>>Second, why then Unicode choose some characters like parantheses >> to have two glyphs whereas others like sqrt haven't. What's the point? > > I think of the mirrored stuff as: "We (Unicode) do not want > to encode separate characters for ltr and rtl contexts (just like > we do not encode separate characters for horizontal and vertical).
At a guess: Left and right parentheses have different semantic meanings as well as different glyphs: a left parens "(" means "start of parenthetical statement" (in English, at least), while a right parens ")" means "end of parenthetical statement." If you had the same semantic value for "(" and ")", how would you determine the value of the following: 45 = 35 (9 + 8 (15 + 12)) If "(" = ")", this might be evaluated as 45 = 35 * (9+8) * 15 + 12 * (null) The use of the parens in text has a similar, if less dramatic, semantic effect. On the other hand, a LTR glyph usually means the same thing as its RTL counterpart: does "LTR Square Root" mean something different than "RTL Square Root?" Patrick Rourke [EMAIL PROTECTED]