Dear Roozbeh,
In page 2 (physical page 3) of the Locale draft, the short format locale is specified in a table with some examples and explanation. The missing information is this:
We know that the correct way to read (pronounce) a short format date that looks like "1358/1/12" is "12-e Farvardin-e 1358" just like the long format (Don't get to kasre-ye ezafe debate please, this is not what I mean).
Since Unicode assumes that text is entered in the same way that it is intended to be read (pronounced or processed, which is called the logical order), one expects to be able to do the following data entry: 12 followed by / followed by 1 followed by 1358.
I suspect that you didn't type it like that, because the normal software would result a display of "12/1/1358". The reason is that / (slash, U+002F) is a neutral character and when surrounded by digits it gets left-to-right directionality according to Unicode bi-di algorithm.
In short, there is no mention of how you get the display results that you are showing in the tables. There are many ways that you can enter data and embed or assume different directionality and get the same visual results. I think you should be specific about directionality assumptions. The logical short format in Persian is "day, month, year", but with normal delimiters and digits this is not how you get the visually correct result of "year/month/day".
The best solution in my opinion is to provide exact format strings (as arrays of Unicode characters with specific placeholders for date elements). This will avoid any possible ambiguity in the specification.
I sincerely hope that you won't tell me that you expect the users to type 1383 then / then 1 then / then 12 to enter a date in short format, because it would be unnatural and none obvious (although currently it may be the only way to get a correct result with the available software applications). The debate here is whether we should turn workarounds that are logically questionable into standards that are assumed to have sound logical foundation.
As I have seen, you have defended going back to using the correct yeh and correcting the faulty software/fonts, so I hope you choose the right thing to do this time as well.
Alright I know, you may say: It is impossible any other way! What is the solution? Answer: Nothing is impossible, but the answer is gonna cost you!
- Hooman Mehr
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