On Tue, 29 Sep 2015 20:27:28 +0100 Daniel Bünzli <daniel.buen...@erratique.ch> wrote:
> Le mardi, 29 septembre 2015 à 19:50, Ken Whistler a écrit : > > I agree that "scalar values greater than U+007F" doesn't just trip > > off the tongue, and while technically accurate, it is bad > > terminology -- precisely because it begs the question "wtf are > > 'scalar values'?!" for the average engineer. > > And an average engineer knows how to lookup definitions, that one > being precise and exceptionally well defined in the Unicode glossary > — in stark contrast to the shady (and deceiving for the newbie) > notion of "character" that you use subsequently in your message. The glossary might fool a 'newbie' (the declared target audience), but its riddled enough with errors to dispel confidence. Just looking at the entries before 'ASCII': OK: 'Abstract character sequence' (if one has a usable understanding of 'abstract character'); 'accent mark', 'acrophonic', 'akshara' (though the spelling with neither an 'h' nor a dot below is weird); 'algorithm', 'alphabet' (though saying that modern Lao and pointed Hebrew use alphabets is probably not very helpful), 'alphabetic' (though it's not obvious to me why ARABIC SUKUN is alphabetic but potentially visible viramas are not), 'alphabetic sorting', 'annotation', 'apparatus criticus', 'Arabic Indic digits' (though are 'European digits' derived from the digits of the eastern part of the Arab world?) Dodgy: 'Abjad' (living abjads also mark vowels, with some vowels having characters dignified as 'letters'). Does normal Egyptian hieroglyphic writing constitute an abjad? 'Abstract character' - but then the definition makes no sense. 'Abugida' - needs 'consonants' and 'vowels' to be qualified by 'most', otherwise it won't even work for Classical Sanskrit in Devanagari. Vowel letters and visarga are the principal problems. 'ANSI' - I don't think the Windows code pages for UTF-8 and UTF-16 are 'ANSI'. 'Arabic digits' - aren't the European digits used in western Arabic as native as the eastern Arabic digits (U+0660 etc.) used in eastern Arabic? 11 more-or-less OK versus 5 dodgy does not generate a great deal of confidence in the glossary. I appreciate that the difference between abjad, abugida and alphabet is difficult to capture, as abjads and abugidas can evolve into alphabets. Richard.