Re: MathML assignment

[Munzir Taha <munzirtaha at newhorizons dot com dot sa>]

On Yaum al-Arbi'a 27 Ramadan 1425 18:43, Youcef Rabah Rahal wrote:
> On Wed, 10 Nov 2004 16:25:24 +0100, Youcef Rabah Rahal
> <y dot rahal at gmail dot com> wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> > http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-math/
>
> Forgot to say that the 8 emails are all in the 2 threads 'MathML in
> Arabic' and 'math in arabic -- w3c mathml group looking for
> contributions' (in the Nov 2004 archives of course :).

Youcef, you mentioned this in your message message:

<quote>
6- This also has already been said and I don't know if this is the
proper channel to discuss it. But it's important to note that the
Unicode statement which says that numbers in Arabic are written LTR
has to be discussed at some point. Numbers in Arabic are read _and_
written  from RTL. Even if in the few last years a new way of writing
and reading numbers has emerged (mainly due to the use of LTR software
?). It's not too late to fix that however.
</quote>

I was about to post a comment there regarding the topic but decided it's 
better not to confuse them with different opinions as much as possible.

I will discuss it here first. The issue of reading and writing numbers LTR in 
Arabic is surely correct and not something new. It's also true that you can 
read it RTL sometimes.

مثلاً حين نقول مائة ألف حينها نكون قرأناها من اليسار إلى اليمين كما ورد في 
القرآن
وإن كنت تعني الأعداد مثل 319 فقد ورد في صحيح مسلم على سبيل المثال من حديث عمر 
ابن الخطاب قال لما كان يوم بدر نظر رسول الله صلى الله عليه وسلم إلى المشركين 
وهم ألف وأصحابه ثلاثمائة وتسعة عشر رجلا فاستقبل نبي الله عليه وسلم القبلة ثم 
مد يديه فجعل يهتف بربه اللهم أنجز لي ما وعدتني ... 

أنا لا أقول أنه لا يصح قراءتها تسعة عشر وثلاثمائة، كلاهما صحيح لكن الأولى 
تريحك من كثير من التعقيدات التي ستنتج والاستثناءات التي سيتحتم عليك توضيحها 
مثلا في حالة أرقام الهاتف، ...

In short, I believe implementation-wise the Unicode has done the optimal and 
most correct solution. If you are convinced with this argument, please 
rephrase/correct your message to MathML list so that they won't get confused.


Also, note that what I am saying has nothing to do with cursor movement 
jumping to back and forth through numbers. This is the second situation where 
I found GTK+ implementation superior to Qt, I forgot the first ;)



-- 
Munzir Taha  PGP Key available
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Telecommunications and Electronics Engineer
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Maintainer of the Open Arabic Bugs Project at
http://wiki.arabeyes.org/OpenBugs
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New Horizons CLC, Riyadh, SA