On 04/30/2012 02:46 PM, Michael Probst wrote:
Isn't this about encoding characters, mapping computer readable numbers to human readable characters (which may be digits), but not about encoding numbers, just as this is not about encoding words? Arabs store (and read, and understand) the least significant digit of a number first, on the right, on paper. An English translation of that text would store (on paper) the most significant digit on the left where it would be read and understood first. The numbers (in the texts) would look and mean the same, but be synthesised and analysed in opposite directions."although digits run the other way, making the scripts inherently bidirectional" http://unicode.org/faq/bidi.html#0 I don't think people writing Ivrit or Arabic perceive their writing as bidirectional.
In my experience, people writing Hebrew do write and read numbers left-to-right. An obvious example is telephone numbers, which one can only *dial* as MSD first, so the natural way to read or write them is also MSD first.
