Re: Reasonable to propose stability policy on numeric type = decimal

From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Sun Jul 25 2010 - 20:53:04 CDT

  • Next message: CE Whitehead: "Re: Reasonable to propose stability policy on numeric type = decimal"

    On 7/25/2010 6:05 PM, Martin J. Dürst wrote:
    >
    >
    > On 2010/07/26 4:37, Asmus Freytag wrote:
    >
    >> PPS: a very hypothetical tough case would be a script where letters
    >> serve both as letters and as decimal place-value digits, and with modern
    >> living practice.
    >
    > Well, there actually is such a script, namely Han. The digits (一、
    > 二、三、四、五、六、七、八、九、〇) are used both as letters and as
    > decimal place-value digits, and they are scattered widely, and of
    > course there are is a lot of modern living practice.
    Martin,

    you found the hidden clue and solved it, first prize :)

    They do not show up as gc=Nd, nor as numeric types Digit or Decimal.

    The situation is worse than you indicate, because the same characters
    are also used as elements in a system that doesn't use place-value, but
    uses special characters to show powers of 10.

    However, as I indicated in my original post, in situations like that,
    there are usually some changes in practice that took place. Much of the
    living modern practice in these countries involves ASCII digits. While
    the ideographic numbers are definitely still used in certain contexts,
    I've not seen them in input fields and would frankly doubt that they
    exist there. I would fully expect that they are supported as number
    format for output, at least in some implementations, and, of course,
    that input methods convert ASCII digits into them. In other words, I
    wonder whether automatic conversion goes only one-way for these numbers.
    I would suspect it, for the general case, but I don't actually know for
    sure.

    For someone in Karl's situation, it would be interesting to learn
    whether and to what extent he should bother supporting these numbers in
    his language extension.

    A./



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