Arcane Jill writes: > ...which brings me back to my question (which no-one's answered yet). > What do the properties "digit" versus "decimal digit" actually MEAN? Is > it possible for someone to give a PRECISE definition. I mean, it seems > pretty clear that "decimal digit" does NOT mean "radix ten digit" > (otherwise circled digit 2 would be a "decimal digit", and it isn't). I > can only assume that the INTENDED meaning of what is (erroneously?) > called "decimal digit" is "a character which is permitted to play a part > in a positional number system" - thus "2" is a decimal digit because it > can form part of the legal number "123", but circled digit 2 is not > because "1?3" is not a legal number. Am I even close?
Look in the public review page http://www.unicode.org/review/ for the proposed new changes notably: 26 Update properties for Ethiopic and Tamil non-decimal digits 2003.01.27 Decimal numbers are those using in decimal-radix number systems. In particular, the sequence of the ONE character followed by the TWO character is interpreted as having the value of twelve. We have gotten feedback that this is the not the case for Ethiopic or Tamil. Details are on the public issues page. This is related to the definition of decimal digits... So a decimal digit property should mean that the character is usable in a positional system to compose numbers with a radix 10. Circled digits don't have a "decimal digit" property because they are not composable to create numbers in a positional system (either left-to-right or right-to-left). But may be they could if one used ligatures like: <CIRCLED DIGIT NINE, ZWJ, CIRCLED DIGIT TWO> to create an abstract character <CIRCLED NUMBER NINETY TWO>. How it will be rendered is another problem, but the need to use a control format with such private encoding convention will still prohibit the character to be assigned a general purpose decimal property. __________________________________________________________________ << ella for Spam Control >> has removed Spam messages and set aside Newsletters for me You can use it too - and it's FREE! http://www.ellaforspam.com
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