Re: Public Review Issue 232 Proposed Update UAX #9, Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm (Copy of email sent to the list; also posted by me to unicode feedback/public review issue-- but this has not yet posted there)

On 2013-02-02, Stephan Stiller <stephan.stiller_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> And sometimes there is no absorption but simply a hard constraint
> against semantic cooccurrence [sic about "oo", which is really the

All of which may be ignored by people with mathematical or programming
training! One of the advantages of the demise of copy-editors in
scholarly publishing is that there's no longer anybody to interfere
with one's logical punctuation.

> What I just wrote in my other email
> "[...] but (as most people here will know), there it has a
> different function."
> is actually a punctuation mistake (there is descriptively no room to
> maneuver here): with the parenthetical phrase, there is a strong need
> for a comma before "there" (though there's a bit of wiggle room wrt

But as in many cases where neither option seems quite right, there's a
third option that's better than either. Had you marked the parenthesis
with commas instead of parens, as would be usual in non-technical
writing, there would be no problem.

> But everyone is familiar with the much more common case of one wanting
> to write "(, " (and space absorption doesn't work here) or ",)" in lists
> with a parenthetical element.

I wondered how familiar I was, and couldn't come up with an example!
Do you have a real-life example? (In non-technical English rather than
Englished mathematics.)

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