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

From: karl williamson (public@khwilliamson.com)
Date: Mon Jul 26 2010 - 21:24:05 CDT

  • Next message: karl williamson: "Re: ? Reasonable to propose stability policy on numeric type = decimal"

    Asmus Freytag wrote:
    > 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.

    I would think I wouldn't support these numbers, since we couldn't be
    unambiguously sure of what was intended.

    Another issue that I brought up a while back on this list is Tamil
    numbers, where western practice seems to have infiltrated enough that
    Unicode gave them Gc=Nd, but IIRC from the responses I got back then,
    they can appear in older style with other characters meaning 10, 100,
    1000. In implementing this, if any of the other characters were
    encountered in parsing such a number, it would disqualify it.
    >
    > A./
    >



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