天火狐 wrote: > I do apologize that it has come to this. For what it's worth, I sympathize > with > your point of view and I do think that your CFJ was brilliant, even if I > didn't > exactly have time to submit a gratuitous argument to support you. > 天火狐 > (Apparently, that Japanese character guy)
I *think* I've learned to recognize your signature, and I've tried to associate it with how google pronounces it - not quite a reflex yet though, and if there were similar-looking characters I probably wouldn't notice the substitution :) And I haven't minded your experiments - if nothing else, made me remember and reflect on Douglas Hofstadter's chapter in Metamagical Themas on cross-language fonts and font recognition, never a bad thing. omd wrote: > (btw, it's unfortunate that your CFJ database is now down :/). That was a silly fit of pique. And 3/4 is still your work, not mine! It should be up again now, let me know if not. ais523 wrote: > Saying "A byte stream containing Arabic text must be interpreted as > though it were laid out left to right" would be in its own right > disrespectful to the language, because that's not how Arabic is written > in practice. So, the crux of it. A couple thoughts. I am a very rudimentary Arabic speaker, learning from a couple books and reading street signs. I've never typed it. I cut and paste it from Google translate. Now, when I did the cut/paste, I wondered "would it paste into my editor in the opposite direction, or what?" Imagine my surprise, when pasted, that, WHEN MY CURSOR WAS IN THE ARABIC TEXT, MY CONTROL KEYS WORKED BACKWARDS. Backspace deleted to the right, and typing spaces and language-neutral punctuation moved the cursor right to left. When I moved the cursor into the Latin text, it went back to what I was used to. I thought "what wizardry is this??" And I thought "these computer programmers (like you) who do these things are $%$%&$* brilliant!" But my other thought was, "hey, it just works". It truly meant, that for an "Arabic writer", both the entry and the reading could naturally start from the right (then end in a gobbledigook reversed latin set of characters) just as the English starts out correctly, then ends in reversed Arabic. I don't know if this works for all email clients, but it was even preserved through emailing - I could reply to my Arabic message and get the same thing. It's not perfect, e.g. line breaks, but for a single sentence on a single line - it just works, naturally, regardless of which language you thought you were typing. So while I don't have any native Arabic speakers handy today, and line breaks are still a problem, I can look at that single line of text and think: each part was entered/typed in the "correct" order for each language, as it truly was, and would be read that way by respective speakers of the languages. So I wonder, as brilliant as the computer programming is that does this, is taking the programming view and breaking it down into the underlying bytes missing the forest for the trees? You, or someone like you, created something that works for someone like me... why decompile?
