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Date/Time: Tue Jun 5 11:17:42 CDT 2012
Contact: cowan@ccil.org
Name: John Cowan
Report Type: Public Review Issue
Opt Subject: PRI #228 Changing some common characters from Punctuation to Symbol
I would be in favor of changing all the characters except HYPHEN-MINUS, which I believe is far more often used as a hyphen than as a minus sign, except in programming. In particular, I think the argument that HYPHEN-MINUS is often used in names like "Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence" or "Jean-Pierre Rampal" is definitive. I also considered the option of leaving the ASCII-repertoire characters alone for the sake of stability and changing the others, but that would pry apart the percent, per mille, and per ten thousand characters, which makes no sense to me.
Date/Time: Sun Jul 22 12:22:30 CDT 2012
Contact: timpart@perdix.demon.co.uk
Name: Timothy Partridge
Report Type: Public Review Issue
Opt Subject: PRI #228 Changing some common characters from Punctuation to Symbol
I have reservations about two of the characters. The ampersand is a scribal abbreviation for the Latin word “et”, and its translations into other languages, e.g.“and” In some texts has been used to contract the appropriate letter sequence in the middle of a word. (U+A76B LATIN SMALL LETTER ET might be intended to be used instead in that context). In some orthographies of the Marshallese language it is used to represent a vowel. The ampersand is accepted in company names in the UK. “&&& LIMITED” “AND & CO RETAIL LIMITED” Along with U+0027 HYPHEN-MINUS its usage in names counts against changing its type to symbol and potentially causing some software to prohibit it. Many of the characters listed are the basis for the categorisation of other characters in the standard. Depending on which characters in the original list are chosen to become symbols some of the following punctuation marks should be considered to be changed into symbols as well for consistency. U+2E36 DAGGER WITH LEFT GUARD U+2E37 DAGGER WITH RIGHT GUARD U+2E38 TURNED DAGGER U+066A ARABIC PERCENT SIGN U+FE6A SMALL PERCENT SIGN U+FF05 FULLWIDTH PERCENT SIGN U+0609 ARABIC-INDIC PER MILLE SIGN U+060A ARABIC-INDIC PER TEN THOUSAND SIGN U+FF03 FULLWIDTH NUMBER SIGN U+204A TIRONIAN SIGN ET U+FE60 SMALL AMPERSAND U+FF06 FULLWIDTH AMPERSAND U+FF0D FULLWIDTH HYPEN-MINUS U+FE63 SMALL HYPHEN-MINUS
Date/Time: Mon Jul 23 12:40:58 CDT 2012
Contact: khw@cpan.org
Name: Karl Williamson
Report Type: Public Review Issue
Opt Subject: PRI #228 Changing some common characters from Punctuation to Symbol
I have reservations mainly about the Hyphen-Minus. But I do have a data point. We at Perl have taken the proposed changes and run them through CPAN regression tests. http://www.cpan.org/ CPAN consists of over 100K modules written in Perl. As far as I know, there was only one failure report. I don't know what percentage of the modules have been tested, but it is a non-trivial amount. The people who would know best are on vacation, and have been so for some time. A reason for the lack of failures is that Perl started out with the Posix punctuation definition, which includes both gc=S and gc=P, so changing from one to the other of those would be transparent to most Perl programs which would use the traditional definition. The amount of regression tests vary widely depending on the module. But the take away message is, that as far as Perl goes, this change is probably acceptable.
Date/Time: Wed Jul 25 17:27:48 CDT 2012
Contact: markus.icu@gmail.com
Name: Markus Scherer
Report Type: Public Review Issue
Opt Subject: PRI #228: P->S, should include data files
I think it would be best to publish for review a complete set of UCD files for the proposed changes (including derived & test files as well as UCA & CLDR root collation), without any other changes from a released version. That would give implementers a better way to evaluate the changes by plugging the modified data into their implementations.
Date/Time: Wed Jan 2 17:47:18 CST 2013
Contact: markus.icu@gmail.com
Name: Markus Scherer
Report Type: Public Review Issue
Opt Subject: PRI #228 Changing chars from P to S vs. collation
One of the differences between Punctuation and Symbols is in the default collation order, and these characters should move in the DUCET if they change General_Category. In particular, sorting and searching with "ignore punctuation" settings, for example with "alternate=shifted" in CLDR/ICU, will ignore punctuation characters but not symbols. Reviewers should take this into account.