Re: Old Orthography

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

Dear Bala:
I am very much confused still with the object of this exercise
-whether we are going for glyph encoding or character encoding.
I am not an expert on Unicode either. So I do not have a quick
answer to your comments/querries. I have to think camly over
the weekend.

>  c) it be better to leave the thus saved spaces for future stuff?
If one does not want to include tamil numerals or granthas or
ORNL because it does not fit with the personal preferences,
it is a different philosophy altogether. I do not want to argue
with that. 

>a) systemic consistency suggest that the old Tamil numeral glyphs 
>    be deal 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
>
In principle one can map anything against anything.  We can
include glyphs of stars, dogs or cows and invoke glyph
substitution to have them replace 1, 2, 3. For arithmatic, we
may get what we want or land up in a mess. If it can help,
why cannot we label these glyphs with some other names 
and avoid using words "numerals" to describe them? This
will avoid all notions of arithmatic coming up. 

To me there is only one numeral set in the 8-bit scheme to
do arithmatic and these are the standard 1,2,3 etc occupying
the slots 48-57 in the lower ASCII block. If my little 
understanding of computers is correct,  mathematical 
operations in all applications, by default are associated
only with these glyphs 48-57 and not with anything else.
(Please, I stand to be corrected on this, i am wrong).
Simply because I choose to call a glyph that looks like ka as 
tamil numeral 1, I cannot use it as 1 in any arithmatics.

My view of the usage of the tamil numerals in the same as that
of unicode having these glyphs in their tamil segment/block.
I do not think unicode is suggesting that these tamil numerals
can be invoked in a routine alternative glyph display so that you
can do arithmatic with them in an all tamil scenario. 
(  I have to check it out. May be some unicode experts can
fill it in. ).  

Kalyan