Re: Encoding of Numbers Composed of Decimal Digits (General Category of Nd)

On 04/30/2012 02:46 PM, Michael Probst wrote:
> Isn't this about encoding characters, mapping computer readable numbers
> to human readable characters (which may be digits), but not about
> encoding numbers, just as this is not about encoding words? Arabs store
> (and read, and understand) the least significant digit of a number
> first, on the right, on paper. An English translation of that text would
> store (on paper) the most significant digit on the left where it would
> be read and understood first. The numbers (in the texts) would look and
> mean the same, but be synthesised and analysed in opposite directions.
>
> "although digits run the other way, making the scripts
> inherently bidirectional"
>
> http://unicode.org/faq/bidi.html#0
>
> I don't think people writing Ivrit or Arabic perceive their writing as
> bidirectional.

In my experience, people writing Hebrew do write and read numbers
left-to-right. An obvious example is telephone numbers, which one can
only *dial* as MSD first, so the natural way to read or write them is
also MSD first.
Received on Tue May 01 2012 - 03:21:12 CDT