> From: karl williamson ([email protected]) > Date: Sun Jul 25 2010 - 17:00:14 CDT > . . . >> From: [email protected] >> Date: Sun, 25 Jul 2010 16:24:01 -0400 >> >> >> > . . . >> > Date: Sun, 25 Jul 2010 10:43:11 -0600 >> > From: [email protected] >> > > . . . >> > >> > Prudence would dictate, then, that when assigning code points to the >> > numbers in a script, that a contiguous block of 12-13 be reserved for >> > them, such that the first one in the block be set aside for ZERO; the >> > next for ONE, etc. >> > >> > My original question comes down to then, would it be reasonable to >> > codify this prudence? People have said it will never happen. But no >> > one has said why that is. >> > >> > Obviously, things can happen that will mess this up--the Phaistos disk >> > could turn out to be a base-46 numbering system, as an extremely >> > unlikely example. But by dictating prudence now, most such eventualities >> > wouldn't happen. >> > >> > I have since looked at the Nt=Di characters. The ones that aren't in >> > contiguous runs are the superscripts and ones that would never be >> > considered to be decimal digits, such as a circled ZERO. >> Hi >> Are you proposing that superscripts be in contiguous runs or not?
> I was not proposing that. Just the codification of what existing > practice has been for Numeric_Type=Decimal_Digit. Superscripts are of > Numeric_Type=Digit; the two names are too similar, and cause confusion. O.k. that's clear enough now. I tend to feel however that Asmus has brought up a reasonable objection -- although in cases other than when some alphabetic characters are reused as numeric ones, this might be at least a non-harmful policy to have (meaning I cannot think of an objection myself right at this moment). > I know of no general purpose programming language that figures out math > equations with superscripts. > If you want exponentiation, you have to > specify an exponentiation operator. > Above >> you disallowed subscripts (although >> I think mathematically subscripts have some meaning in equations as do >> superscripts and it might worth converting them albeit separately from >> other numbers; if these were converted it would allow complete equations >> to be converted from character strings -- but with only digits 1-9 I do >> not see that much of an issue; I'd personally like to find a subscript >> i; but so far I've just looked at: >> http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2070.pdf where the subscripts 0-9 are all >> contiguous but the superscript 1, 2, and 3 are not; searching through >> http://unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/UnicodeData.txt that was all I found; >> I then started going through code charts one by one and so far have >> gotten as far as Old South Arabian and have not found superscript i or >> more superscript decimal numbers though maybe I've missed something -- >> the Arabic sukun is not going to be part of a series of superscripts in >> any case). >> Sorry again. Subscript i is encoded; I missed it; indeed there are a a number of subscript characters currently encoded. What I found were: subscript lower case letters: a; e; o; x; schwa; j; i; r; u; v (still looking for more); also Greek letters betta; gamma; rho; chi; phi (still looking for alpha and delta but of course maybe I do not know where to search yet). (But this is another thread entirely.) Best, C. E. Whitehead [email protected]
