Re: Hexadecimal digits

From: Luke-Jr (luke@dashjr.org)
Date: Tue Jun 08 2010 - 15:36:31 CDT

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    On Tuesday 08 June 2010 02:43:22 pm John Dlugosz wrote:
    > So it's only history that some glyphs used as digits are separate and
    > others (for Computer Science work anyway) are not. In practice, we don't
    > need unique assignments, in general. There are characters that are used
    > in numeric literals and they are a subset of those used for words in
    > general.

    I see this as saying that we don't need HTML, XML, or any other content-
    describing formats, and arguing that we should stick to a format that merely
    describes the appearance (such as PDF or Postscript) since the meaning can be
    implied from how it appears.

    Assuming you don't actually believe that-- why should it be any different on
    the character level?

    Finally, there are in fact rendering differences between O and 0 (or else
    nobody would understand your history lacking the words "letter", "number", and
    "symbol"), and it is plausable if the tonal system were encoded that a font
    might like to give visual hints as to the difference between a decimal 2 and a
    tonal 2.



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