Ubuntu-RTL Digest, Vol 6, Issue 4

[Chris Scaife]

Message: 3
Date: Sun, 12 Dec 2010 06:07:19 +0300
From: Usama Akkad <uahello at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Directionality without prejudice
To: ubuntu-rtl at lists.ubuntu.com
Message-ID: <1292123239.2241.6.camel at localhost.localdomain>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"

Hi, I've just read Yaron pronunciation of Arabic number and I think it's
totally false. It's all in a slang or not Arabic.

But you are right that numbers are usually read from right to left.

Lol - well the idea is to accommodate EVERY dialect of EVERY language,
regardless of what is main stream ;)
The important issue for me seems to be that Unicode standard is telling the
whole wide world R2L speakers write numbers back to front!

I was completely ignorant of how other cultures do deal with numbers, but
IMHO we ALL write them and read them as is appropriate to our traditions and
locale. Thus instead of imposing a directionality on digits and reversing
their display order for R2L languages IMHO the computer should be told to
PROCESS and to GENERATE them in the order appropriate for the user's locale.

For instance in my own number formatting routines it was easiest to convert
numeric strings with least significant digit first, but I was working in a
left to right tradition. Yet I DID NOT insert a right to left embedding code
but actually reversed the string I created so that the stream would contain
most significant digits before less significant ones.

While I appreciate the phenomenal amount of work that the Unicode consortium
is doing... http://unicode.org/reports/tr9/#Bidirectional_Character_Types
I do feel they are "barking up the wrong tree" and will NEVER get a good
solution that way :(
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