Re: Assigning a plane for mapping digits for many different bases

From: Luke-Jr (luke@dashjr.org)
Date: Tue Mar 08 2011 - 16:09:07 CST

  • Next message: Ken Whistler: "Re: Assigning a plane for mapping digits for many different bases"

    On Tuesday, March 08, 2011 2:32:14 pm Ken Whistler wrote:
    > On 3/7/2011 9:28 PM, Tiago Estill de Noronha wrote:
    > > How about assigning a whole plane (one of the currently unassigned
    > > ones) for digit characters, starting from the digit for zero at the
    > > beggining and going up in sequence; without defining the actual
    > > appearance of the digits (different fonts would draw them their own
    > > way). This wouldn't deal with ambiguity between different bases, but
    > > would allow standardsation of digits for writing numbers in lots of
    > > bases, all the way up to somewhere around base 65535
    >
    > Not gonna happen.
    >
    > > What do you think?
    >
    > Not a good idea. What problem is it trying to solve?
    >
    > There are perfectly valid, widespread and agreed upon notations for
    > decimal, binary, hexadecimal, and octal numbers, using existing
    > characters. There are a few advocates for duodecimal systems who want
    > special symbols for 10 and 11,
    > or who want some other special encoding.

    Hey, don't forget tonal!

    That said, I also think this is a bad idea-- fonts shouldn't choose characters
    like that. It'd be like using the same entries for the Latin and Cyrillic
    alphabets.



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