Re: [WMASTERS] Re: Old Orthography, response to Kalyan

[Bala Pillai <bala@apic.net>]

At 08:57 AM 9/18/97 +0000, Dr.K. Kalyanasundaram wrote:

>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.

Apologies if this is a dumb question, Kalyan, but if the UNICODE rule is to
encode characters not glyphs and considering what we have done for the
other characters,
wouldn't:-

a) systemic consistency suggest that the old Tamil numeral glyphs be dealt
with
    as an alternative glyph display of 1,2,3 etc?
b) UNICODE rules be violated (even though they are partly on UNICODE 2.0
perhaps through
    some "they appear on Mauritius currency notes" [so what?] misunderstanding
c) it be better to leave the thus saved spaces for future stuff?

Sorry to stretch your patience, Kalyan....

anbudan..../bala


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