From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Tue Nov 25 2003 - 17:49:01 EST
There's still my unanswered question about the third numeric field not
filled for some numeric characters (notably Nl characters, i.e. number
letters).
I accepted the fact of being unable to define it for the "numerator one less
than the denominator", but the Latin Roman number 900 has NO defined numeric
value, and I don't see why. I would accept a rationale based on contextual
meaning of the number, where its actual value changed between sources, but I
don't think that the Roman 900 number letter has another possible value than
900.
As the first reason why scripts have been standardized, learned and tought
during the history is its use for accounting purpose, I doubt that merchants
would have accepted an ambiguous meaning of these characters. If this ever
occured in some local cultures, which brought a foreign glyph in their
script, the use of the glyph creates a new abstract character that merits
another name in Unicode and other properties.
So I suggest you load the UCD in any spreadsheet, sort it on the general
category column, and look at the numeric characters (third column starting
by N):
- all "Nd" characters should have their 3 numeric defined equally between 0
and 9,
- all "Ni" characters should have only their last two fields set equally
with a simple integer, and
- all "Nl" characters should have something set in the third field only
(except possibly for the "numerator one less than the denominator"
character, which could have its own "No" category for "Numeric, other".)
Philippe.
-----Message d'origine-----
De : unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org]De la
part de Mark Davis
Envoyé : mardi 25 novembre 2003 20:10
À : Arcane Jill; unicode@unicode.org
Objet : Re: numeric properties of Nl characters in the UCD
The fields are the way they are for backwards compatibility. If you look at
the UCD.html, you will see that the actual properties are separated:
http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/UCD.html#Numeric_Type
I'd like to remind people again that you should read the documentation in
UCD.html before trying to make sense of the raw data files.
Mark
__________________________________
http://www.macchiato.com
? ????????????????????? ?
----- Original Message -----
From: Arcane Jill
To: unicode@unicode.org
Sent: Tue, 2003 Nov 25 02:42
Subject: RE: numeric properties of Nl characters in the UCD
Actually, I don't understand why UnicodeData.txt has no less than three
different fields for numerical value anyway. I mean, it's not as though
there exists EVEN A SINGLE CODEPOINT for which two or more of these fields
exist and are defined differently from each other. One never sees, for
example, a character for which "digit value" is 3 and "numeric value" is 4.
It seems to me that one single numeric field would suffice.
You may need a second field to establish what "kind" of number this is
(decimal digit, whatever), but then maybe you could figure that out from the
general category anyway.
Jill
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Philippe Verdy [mailto:verdy_p@wanadoo.fr]
> Sent: Sunday, November 23, 2003 2:58 AM
> To: Unicode@Unicode.Org
> Subject: numeric properties of Nl characters in the UCD
>
>
> I do understand why number letter characters with "Nl"
> general category
> don't have a "decimal value" property or a "integer value"
> property, but why
> they don't all have a "numeric value" property in the UCD.
__________________________________________________________________
<< ella for Spam Control >> has removed Spam messages and set aside
Newsletters for me
You can use it too - and it's FREE! http://www.ellaforspam.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Nov 25 2003 - 18:30:57 EST