Re: Motion 46 -- Right to left intervals
Thank you for the clarification -- I should have talked to you in
the first place!
> In both cases, the file or the memory stores the characters in the
> "logical order" not the "screen order".
This is a helpful distinction -- but it does raise the issue of
numerals in strings. I seem to recall that small integers (year
numbers, page numbers) are presented in the same direction as in
Latin scripts (high-order digit on the left), which means that
they need to be written least-significant-digit-first into a
string -- the opposite of printf order. Does this also apply
to floating-point or scientific notation? What about the sign
position? And would the exponent denotation use a Latin 'e'?
(And for that matter, which characters are used for hexadecimal?
Which glyphs would decimal numerals use -- the ones we call Arabic
or the ones that are actually used in Arabic?)
Or is there a string-to-screen convention for inserting an escape
sequence to change direction on a field basis? Is there something
similar used for input from a keyboard?
It would make parsing interesting if the exponent was encountered
first, followed by an optional sign and the exponent letter, followed
by the significand (when reading from an Arabic terminal). I have
not seen anything about this in atof() or scanf().
Michel.
P.S. This discussion has veered significantly from P1788 since I'm sure
it will state that these matters are out of scope -- nevertheless
we should all strive for wider cultural awareness.
---Sent: 2013-07-22 14:20:30 UTC