Re: my Bidi implementation

[dov at imagic dot weizmann dot ac dot il]

Funny, I had kind of a dejavu when I read about "just having a bidi
algorithm that work". I had the same feeling a number of years ago,
and the result was Fribidi... The question of "why does it have
to be so complicated" is a good question, but in a sense it doesn't
matter. The only standard that exists is the Unicode one, and the
chances of getting the world to accept something that is not standard
is very small... What exactly is it that you don't like about
FriBidi?

Now regarding the implementation, last time I checked Behdad (or
was it Owen Taylor?) had implemented a double lookup. First the upper 
bits are used to select a 128-byte block. The lower bits are then 
used to lookup into this lower block. A perl program generates the
code and has the additional compression to compare the contents of
the 128-byte block. If you hit upon a complete block that has
already been built (e.g. all 128 bytes are LTR) then you just
reference the existing block. Probably this compression has been
updated a bit more, but I believe that is still the basic idea.

Regards,
Dov