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

From: David Starner (prosfilaes@gmail.com)
Date: Wed Mar 09 2011 - 12:13:28 CST

  • Next message: Peter Constable: "RE: Assigning a plane for mapping digits for many different bases"

    On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 8:15 AM, Peter Constable <petercon@microsoft.com> wrote:
    > From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org] On Behalf Of David Starner
    >
    >> There's enough advocates for duodecimal systems that I could make a case
    >> for Unicode encoding, provided Unicode was willing to unify massively
    >> disparate glyphs.
    >
    > I don't think an acceptable case can be made. Numbers are abstract quantities. Presenting a number using duodecimal digits is a matter of _presentation_.
    [...]
    > For a presentation convention, the existing characters are completely adequate. The existing characters are also fully adequate for document content that will never undergo that kind of processing described above; moreover, it's what people are certainly going to be typing since they have been doing so with existing keyboards and fonts for years.

    I don't understand your message.
    http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015017382519;page=root;view=image;size=100;seq=15;num=7
    shows a page from a book on the duodecimal system that uses two
    completely new characters for 10 and 11, that can not be unified with
    any other characters in Unicode. If it were so simple that all the
    duodecimal promoters used those characters, I think the case would be
    solid.

    The fact that people have used substitutes did not stop the various
    hyphens from getting encoded, nor did it stop a few Mayan characters a
    few years back, or the Egyptian yod.

    -- 
    Kie ekzistas vivo, ekzistas espero.
    


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