Re: Hebrew

[Mike Brenner <mikeb@mitre.org>]

>> What type of functionality? Right-to-left? It doesn't seem like that big a deal - wide_text_io could handle it right now, right?

Florian Weimer wrote:
> In the Unicode universe, handling right-to-left scripts correctly is mostly the job of the terminal, not of the application. Unicode stores characters in logical order, not in visual order.


To expand on that, the renderer (terminal driver, print
driver, etc.) is the component that goes back and forth, but
some systems have directional attributes that tell the
device driver when to go back and forth. See, for example,
http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/attrs.html which
shows how this is done for web pages using html 4.0 using
the dir=rtl (direction=right2left) attribute.

The point is that Ada would just be generating the string
and the device driver would be interpreting the string; that
is, the device driver would be making it switch to
right2left mode, not Ada.

BTW this is important for quite a few languages, not just
Hebrew. It is fundamental for Arabic, Biblical Hebrew,
Farsi, Ancient Greek, etc., per se. But many languages, like
English, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, etc., also use different
directions of text when quoting right-to-left languages in
the middle of left-to-right text, or when writing in columns
or other than left-to-right paragraphs.

-----

This is like the question of whether coding should be done
in UTF-8 or use a 16-bit character encoding. UTF-8 has
advantages for websites in simple English and most American
emails. Various 16-bit codes have advantages for Asian
languages, eCommerce encodings, multi-language web sites.
The question is, is it important for English speaking people
to make codings, software, web sites, advertisements, etc.,
that work well for people of many different languages?

Or, to restate that question, is it important for Asia to
use the same Unicode, the same character encodings, and
ultimately, compatible web pages with Europe and the
Americas?

It is amazing that in 2001 the fonts that come with American
computers and web browsers don't include most of Unicode
yet.

Mike