Hi,

I was busy, the last couple of days. Thank you for the information, that is very encouraging. some specific comments follow:

On Jun 19, 2004, at 7:35 PM, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:

On Sat, 2004-06-19 at 18:41, Hooman Mehr wrote:
[...] 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.

That will be specified in a coming appendix, which will have the locale data for ICU and GNU C library.

Excellent. There you will have to assume a certain stream order for the placeholders of day, month, year which will answer my question.



Anyway, the situation is worse than what you may guess. The Unicode Consortium has changed the bidirectional category of a few characters, including Slash, in Unicode 4.0.1. For Slash and its brethren, it's not just Neutral or things like that. We are having stuff like European Terminators and Common Separators in the Unicode Bidi algorithm.

Yes, I wasn't precise in specifying the exact properties and classification of slash in Unicode and bidi algorithm, I hope they don't make it worse than now by even more semantically overloading it. I am not sure whether U+002F is a good separator at all for the purpose of Persian short date. It sure looks OK, but its properties have no resemblance to Persian short date separator. Its meaning is too much overloaded in different contexts and regions. Directional ambiguity concerning Persian date only makes the matters worse.

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...
I'm not implying anything about users here. We are specifying how the
final text should be displayed. ...
You may not intend to imply, but developers tend to interpret. Since currently there is no straightforward and obvious way to get correct result when typing a date in short format using U+002F, I suggest you explicitly state this issue and clarify that locale document is silent regarding entry and stream order of the date elements.


I say: the answer is too technical to be included in the locale
specification. There will be different answers for different situations,
in different contexts, or in different Unicode versions.


I see your point, but what about the poor user? I admit I need to tackle these issues in Persian GUI spec instead of trying to push them on you. On the other hand, we have to be careful not to end up contradicting each other. I will wait for the ICU glibc stuff before I can comment. When do you expect to have a draft on them?

BTW, Behdad is attending the Unicode Consortium's Technical Committee
meeting right now, and later the ISO JTC1/SC2 ones. I'm sure the UTC
meeting (which will be the first with a FarsiWeb member present) will
have good news for us (which may include more changes and clarifications
to the Bidirectional algorithm).


Excellent news. While talking about clarifications, I couldn't find the properties for U+060D. Do you have information in this regard?

- Hooman Mehr

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