From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Sun May 21 2006 - 21:21:50 CDT
David Starner <prosfilaes at gmail dot com> replied to Steve Summit <scs
at eskimo dot com>:
>> Funny you should mention that -- just yesterday I was realizing that
>> having distinct code points for "full stop" versus "decimal point",
>> and "comma" versus "thousands separator", would be quite useful,
>> especially when doing on-the-fly conversion of text to properly
>> locale-representative forms.
>
> But they wouldn't be useful. They would be confused all the time, and
> hardly any data would exist that used them properly. It's not that
> hard to invent a system to distinguish them if you working on a closed
> system where they will be reliabily distinguished; if you have to do
> it at the character set level, you have private use points.
In fact, the concept of a generic decimal-point character is used in the
ISO "Principles and Procedures" document
(http://std.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/docs/n3002.pdf) as a classic example
of what *not* to encode. See section F.4 on page 28.
-- Doug Ewell Fullerton, California, USA http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
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