Re: Hexadecimal characters.

From: Tom Finch (thinkit8@lycos.com)
Date: Thu Jun 20 2002 - 17:45:34 EDT


 

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On Thu, 20 Jun 2002 12:56:25 Kenneth Whistler wrote: >> >> At 03:03 AM 6/20/02 -0400, Tom Finch wrote: >> >> >I wish to propose sixteen consecutive digits for the purpose of displaying >> >> >hexadecimal values. [...] Has this been considered? >> >> > >[David Starner] > >> >> I seem to recall that it has. The problem is, they're just new copies of >> >> old characters. An A used in hexadecimal notation is just an A. Besides the >> >> problem with normalization, you have the problem with all look-alike >> >> characters - people won't use them consistently. Even if this got adopted, >> >> 99% of time you looked at hexadecimal numbers, they would be in plain old >> >> ASCII, so you don't really gain anything but confusion. It's a no-go. >> >> > >[Tom Finch] > >> I looked at the code chart and there are many 16 character sequences empty. > >That is true enough -- but the more appropriate place to look is the >BMP roadmap: > >http://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/bmp-3-6.html > >where you can see that many of those empty columns are already accounted >for by roadmapped allocations for living minority scripts. The BMP is >rather tight now for allocation, and it is unlikely that the committees are >going to look kindly on miscellaneous collections of dubious stuff for >encoding there. > >Of course there is plenty of space in Plane 1 for just about everything, >but... > >That said, David Starner has this one right. There really is no good reason >to create clones of 0..9, A..F to represent hexadecimal digits. The >existing characters do that just fine, and represent an overwhelming >legacy data representation precedent that any proposal such as Tom Finch's >would have to cope with. Introducing new characters for these would just >introduce confusion and would be unlikely to be implemented in any >useful way. > >--Ken >

Hmm, so representing Devanagari digits is more important than hexadecimal, which is used almost more than decimal on the web? I know inertia is a law of the universe, but this is rediculous. Hexadecimal is very important and deserves to be in Plane 0. I see a good spot in misc technical (23D--oh look hexadecimal again).

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