From: Tiago Estill de Noronha (tiagotiagot@gmail.com)
Date: Mon Mar 07 2011 - 23:28:09 CST
I was reading a thread about adding unambiguous characters for base 16 digits and i got this idea:
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 (existing digits in different scripts, regardless of base, would be kept in their current codepoints for backwards compatibility, but the there would be orientation for developers etc to replace those characters with the equivalent ones in the digits plane wherever possible; in situations where writing with a specific script is desired one would use a different font or otherwise add instructions to remap the encoded digits to the legacy script specific digit codepoints). It wouldn't touch identifying which base a number is written in, just like how A-z can be used in different languages without explicitly stating which, the characters in the digits plane wouldn't be restricted to being used in an specific base; it's my understanding that creating an international standard for specifying which base a number is represented in, or which script is used to write it, is out of the scope of Unicode.
In charts and stuff, perhaps instead of keeping them blank or picking an specific script, you could draw them like 0-9, then A-Z, then a-z, all in English, then use the digits characters in other scripts in the order they appear in unicode, till you run out of them; and then perhaps for the remaining ones use some graphical representation of the equivalent numbers in binary, somthing like " ▘, ▝, ▀, ▖, ▌, ▞, ▛, ▗, ▚, ▐, ▜, ▄, ▙, ▟, █" (that is 1 to 16) but with 16 bits instead of four, for example.
What do you think?
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