Re: hexadecimal notation in non-Western languages

From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Thu Feb 16 2006 - 02:24:25 CST

  • Next message: Richard Wordingham: "Re: hexadecimal notation in non-Western languages"

    On 2/15/2006 7:11 PM, Kit Peters wrote:

    > Ah, I see the confusion. I'm not suggesting that specialized "hex"
    > characters be added to Unicode - far from it. Rather I am asking (and
    > I see now that the question is a bit off-topic) if any non-Western
    > cultures do something similar to hexadecimal notation for noting
    > out-of-base numbers.

    We haven't seen a lot of requests for support of advanced mathematics
    using other than the currently standard (Western) notation, with
    exception of Arabic where you can find interesting things line a cube
    root symbol with an Arabic-Indic digit 3, etc.

    The general question you pose might belong with historians of
    mathematics, as they would know how those mathematicians who did explore
    different number bases before world-wide contact, did so in their
    respective writing systems.

    The other constituency might be educators. It's often the case that
    textbooks in lower grades will be more 'native'. I've heard of
    Arabic-only and Hindi-only textbooks, but don't have access to examples.

    Unicode is fairly encompassing, but when it comes to historical use of
    special notation, or educational use of characters, it's often difficult
    to get enough information to design an encoding, and even if the facts
    are reasonably clear, the demand may not be acute. In such cases, the
    character encoding community is not the best source of information
    (because we haven't been asked to consider these types of issues there
    is no institutional memory to tap).

    A./

    >



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