On 9 Jun 2010, at 19:55, John H. Jenkins wrote:
Unicode encodes characters, not glyphs. In order to separately encode a hexadecimal-2 separately from an decimal-2, you'd either have to show either that the two are, in fact, inherently different characters (in which case you'd better be prepared to separately encode the octal-2 and the duodecimal-2 et al.), or you'd have to two that widespread existing practice treats them as distinct or at least draws them distinctly.
Mathematically, they are semantically the same. And if they look the same, one still cannot convey that contextual information of the base. Some numbers of different bases will be homographs, but in language, one lets the context convey what is meant.
The use of prefixes or suffixes to convey the base only serves to make a context independent representation of the number. It simplifies a traditional lexer-parser implementation of computer languages, as one can let the lexer parse it.
Hans
