From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Tue Nov 11 2003 - 05:41:01 EST
Jim Ramonsky posted:
> It's a strawman argument, and it's sidetracking away from the original
issue of whether or not
> there should exist Unicode characters for which IsDigit() returns true and
for which GetDigitValue() > returns values in the range ten to fifteen.
Why restricting to this range then? The range of digits is mathematically
infinite if you consider any possible radix...
In reality, you are defending the adoption of supplementary digits for
natural sort. But stop supporting the WG2 proposal that clearly DOES NOT
address your issue: it even does not guarantee that your IsDigit() function
will return true for them (the author still considers them as letters when
he states that they should collate along letters).
Nothing has been done in reality in this proposal to address numeric
correctness, and nothing for natural sort. Instead all that is addressed in
the proposal is a glyph constraint on some digits and not others which is
equally stupid. The proposal posted to WG2, if it had been coherent, would
have also requested the adoption of figure-width 0-to-9 digits.
What you want is not what the author of the proposal to WG2 wants. In fact
you have radically different justifications. If you want to support the WG2
proposal, will you accept that he revizes his proposal to also include
figure-width decimal digits ? If so, you will have for your natural sort
several digits to manage: the ASCII ones, and the new ones needed for
figure-width constraints.
You won't be able to claim that "a digit is a digit that is a digit"...
Be honnest, what you want is supplementary digits, independantly of their
presentation: couldn't your digits have very distinct representative glyphs,
completely unrelated to letters A to F, but still completely unrelated to
figure-width constraints?
So you glyphs for these digits could be as well something like <1'0> for
digit 10, with the apostrophe denoting a ligaturing connection between the
two decimal digits equivalent to its value, or something like <¹0> or the
like the roman multigraphs <X> to <XV> or an upper letter glyph on top of a
baseline horizontal stroke, or slashed letters A to F, or slashed digits 0
to 5 or even completely invented glyphs ...
What you want is completely unrelated to the actual presentation of the
digits, and figure-width is not a significant issue for your need.
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