From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Fri Oct 28 2005 - 13:34:28 CST
From: "Kenneth Whistler" <kenw@sybase.com>
> How about the fact that if you presume that the compatibility number
> forms are supposed to be used for the representation of Roman numerals
> in general, your example for 13 would be multiply ambiguous
> in representation:
>
> XIII = <2169, 2162> (<X, III>)
> XIII = <2169, 2161, 2160> (<X, II, I>)
> XIII = <2169, 2160, 2160, 2160> (<X, I, I, I>)
> XIII = <216A, 2161> (<XI, II>)
> XIII = <216A, 2160, 2160> (<XI, I, I>)
> XIII = <216B, 2160> (<XII, I>)
>
> Once you start down that road, you haven't got a logical leg to stand
> on to distinguish between your cases. You'd be arguing for an incoherent
> system that *badly* represents Roman numerals.
I see the extra encoded roman numerals as facilities, i.e. ligatures encoded
without decompositions, only for full roundtrip compatibility with legacy
charsets that define them as characters.
But it's true that the Roman numerals are still not complete, and cannot all
be represented correctly in plain text, despite they arguably are plain
text.
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