>>Second, why then Unicode choose some characters like parantheses
>> to have two glyphs whereas others like sqrt haven't. What's the point?
>
> I think of the mirrored stuff as: "We (Unicode) do not want
> to encode separate characters for ltr and rtl contexts (just like
> we do not encode separate characters for horizontal and vertical).
At a guess: Left and right parentheses have different semantic meanings as
well as different glyphs: a left parens "(" means "start of parenthetical
statement" (in English, at least), while a right parens ")" means "end of
parenthetical statement." If you had the same semantic value for "(" and
")", how would you determine the value of the following:
45 = 35 (9 + 8 (15 + 12))
If "(" = ")", this might be evaluated as
45 = 35 * (9+8) * 15 + 12 * (null)
The use of the parens in text has a similar, if less dramatic, semantic
effect. On the other hand, a LTR glyph usually means the same thing as its
RTL counterpart: does "LTR Square Root" mean something different than "RTL
Square Root?"
Patrick Rourke
ptrourke@methymna.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Mar 29 2002 - 13:17:44 EST