Sorry Roozbeh,
but Michael is right. That is the way how iranian newspapers use the '/' in
numbers and currencies. So when you distinguish between Novice and Professional
FARSI speaker you should first revolute the whole iranian writing class in not to
use the '/' they are used to do.
regards,
Darya
Roozbeh Pournader schrieb:
> On Mon, 2 Oct 2000, Michael (michka) Kaplan wrote:
>
> > The slash character "/" is in the Unicode Bidi algorithm classified as
> > a "European Separator" which means that text would
> > be expected to be reversed (i.e. 1/2 would be expected to be 2/1). However,
> > the the Farsi language (which uses the Arabic script) the slash is also a
> > decimal separator for currency, thus 123.45 would appear as 123/45.
>
> Slash is the date separator in Farsi, and not the decimal separator.
> Persian has it's own decimal separator encoded in Unicode: U+066B.
> So, 1/2 in Farsi may mean second day of the first month, or one half of a
> unit, but surely not 1.2.
>
> Some people haver "misused" the slash as a decimal separator, but that's
> not a good reason for a different behaviour. I think that changing the
> Bidi behaviour only creates incompatiblity problems, and annoys even the
> people who misuse the slash.
>
> > The end result is indeed what a native Farsi speaker
> > expects. I would find it unfortunate if this "bug" were "fixed" since it
> > would be done at the expense of Farsi users.
>
> No. This is not what a Farsi speaker expects. There are two kinds of Farsi
> speakers, professional users, and novice users. Professional users need
> compatiblity in different environments, and so they need the behaviour to
> be consistent. Novice ones are also not familiar with many other things,
> so they will become accustomed to it. Of course, things like the lack of
> Farsi decimal separator in Microsoft Farsi keyboard really annoys, and
> that may be the reason behind possible non-conformance in some Microsoft
> products.
>
> BTW, I've been on mozilla-i18n mailing list which also addresses bidi, and
> I have not heard anything about this mis-feature.
>
> --roozbeh
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