Re: Hexadecimal characters.

From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Thu Jun 20 2002 - 18:32:11 EDT


Tom Finch said:

> Hmm, so representing Devanagari digits is more important
> than hexadecimal, which is used almost more than decimal
> on the web?

I think you may be misconstruing the purpose of the character
encoding here.

If I want to represent the hexadecimal numbers 0x60DB 0x618A
in email or in HTML hexadecimal NCR's or whatever, guess what --
I can use ASCII (or Latin-1 or Unicode) characters: "6" "0" "D"
"B" "6" "1" "8" "A" -- and that is what everyone does.

It is also what is *required* by the HTML and XML standards
for the representation of hexadecimal NCR's on the web, by
the way.

If I want to represent Devanagari digits, on the other hand,
I don't have an ASCII representation to hand -- those *require*
separate encoding, since Devanagari characters are not the
same as Latin characters or Arabic digits. So Devanagari
digits were encoded in Unicode. Simple.
   
> I know inertia is a law of the universe, but this is rediculous.
> Hexadecimal is very important and deserves to be in Plane 0.

Umm. It *is* in Plane 0: U+0030..U+0039, U+0041..U+0046 (and
U+0061..U+0066), to be exact.

> I see a good spot in misc technical (23D--oh look hexadecimal again).

Nobody has any quarrel with the notion that hexadecimal notation
is very important in computer science -- and vital for character
encoding discussions. The issue is whether we need any separate
characters to represent hexadecimal digits, when we already have
the digits everybody has been using for decades encoded.

--Ken



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