From: CE Whitehead (cewcathar@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun Jul 25 2010 - 21:45:10 CDT
> From: karl williamson (public@khwilliamson.com)
> Date: Sun Jul 25 2010 - 17:00:14 CDT
> . . .
>> From: cewcathar@hotmail.com
>> Date: Sun, 25 Jul 2010 16:24:01 -0400
>>
>>
>> > . . .
>> > Date: Sun, 25 Jul 2010 10:43:11 -0600
>> > From: public@khwilliamson.com
>> >
> . . .
>> >
>> > Prudence would dictate, then, that when assigning code points to the
>> > numbers in a script, that a contiguous block of 12-13 be reserved for
>> > them, such that the first one in the block be set aside for ZERO; the
>> > next for ONE, etc.
>> >
>> > My original question comes down to then, would it be reasonable to
>> > codify this prudence? People have said it will never happen. But no
>> > one has said why that is.
>> >
>> > Obviously, things can happen that will mess this up--the Phaistos disk
>> > could turn out to be a base-46 numbering system, as an extremely
>> > unlikely example. But by dictating prudence now, most such eventualities
>> > wouldn't happen.
>> >
>> > I have since looked at the Nt=Di characters. The ones that aren't in
>> > contiguous runs are the superscripts and ones that would never be
>> > considered to be decimal digits, such as a circled ZERO.
>> Hi
>> Are you proposing that superscripts be in contiguous runs or not?
> I was not proposing that. Just the codification of what existing
> practice has been for Numeric_Type=Decimal_Digit. Superscripts are of
> Numeric_Type=Digit; the two names are too similar, and cause confusion.
O.k. that's clear enough now.
I tend to feel however that Asmus has brought up a reasonable objection
-- although in cases other than when some alphabetic characters are reused as numeric ones,
this might be at least a non-harmful policy to have (meaning I cannot think of an objection myself right at this moment).
> I know of no general purpose programming language that figures out math
> equations with superscripts.
> If you want exponentiation, you have to
> specify an exponentiation operator.
> Above
>> you disallowed subscripts (although
>> I think mathematically subscripts have some meaning in equations as do
>> superscripts and it might worth converting them albeit separately from
>> other numbers; if these were converted it would allow complete equations
>> to be converted from character strings -- but with only digits 1-9 I do
>> not see that much of an issue; I'd personally like to find a subscript
>> i; but so far I've just looked at:
>> http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2070.pdf where the subscripts 0-9 are all
>> contiguous but the superscript 1, 2, and 3 are not; searching through
>> http://unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/UnicodeData.txt that was all I found;
>> I then started going through code charts one by one and so far have
>> gotten as far as Old South Arabian and have not found superscript i or
>> more superscript decimal numbers though maybe I've missed something --
>> the Arabic sukun is not going to be part of a series of superscripts in
>> any case).
>>
Sorry again. Subscript i is encoded; I missed it; indeed there are a a number of subscript characters currently encoded.
What I found were:
subscript lower case letters: a; e; o; x; schwa; j; i; r; u; v (still looking for more);
also Greek letters betta; gamma; rho; chi; phi (still looking for alpha and delta but of course maybe I do not know where to search yet).
(But this is another thread entirely.)
Best,
C. E. Whitehead
cewcathar@hotmail.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun Jul 25 2010 - 21:48:30 CDT