Re: Old Orthography, response to Kalyan

["Dr.K. Kalyanasundaram" <kalyan@igcsun3.epfl.ch>]

Dear Prof. Hart:

> And what happens when someone uses these Tamil numerals, 
> and someone else wants to paste them into an Excel spreadsheet 
> and do calculations with  them? 

I clarified this point a couple of times. If you have missed,
tamil numerals as envisaged in the present 8-bit scheme have
no "real mathematical significance". They are plain "glyphs"
as any other tamil glyphs kuu or mii or roman ones such as
A or L or whatever. 
You cannot use them in the keypad, for example to do any
arithmatic. It is just like trying to use upper roman letters 
like X, III etc to do arithmatic on Excel or whatever.
You can try inputting X + III =  (using roman letters ) 
on the keyboard or Excel and see if you can get any answer 
out. Nothing will happen (you will get an error message!). 
Period.
Any notion of doing arithmatic with tamil numerals or
trying to equate them to roman numerals like 1, 2, 3 etc
is a total misconception and this has to lead to wrong
conclusions and unwanted debates.

Muthu fully agrees with this view of mine.

Kalyan