On Sat, Jul 24, 2010 at 1:00 PM, Michael Everson <[email protected]> wrote:
> Digits can be scattered randomly about the code space and it wouldn't make > any difference. Having written a library for performing conversions between Unicode strings and numbers, I disagree. While it is not all that hard to deal with the case in which the characters for the digits are scattered about the code space, if they occupy a contiguous set of code points in order of their value as they do, e.g., in ASCII, it simplifies both the conversion itself and such tasks as identifying the numeral system of a numeric string and checking the validity of a string as a number in a particular numeral system. It may well be that adopting such a policy is not realistic, but there would be advantages to it if were.
