Unicode hexadecimal characters

[Terry Hancock]

Take a look at http://www.unicode.org/ for more information,
I was able to download the v3.2.0 UCD and scan it (I was
curious too).  I just searched it for the strings "DIGIT",
"HEX", and "NUMBER". 

The answer appears to be "No", though, which I think is
kind of a funny oversight.  Surely, HEXADECIMAL DIGIT A
would be at least as conceptually different from, say,
LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A as that is from CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER A.
Yet there are separate characters for the latter two, but it looks like 
LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A has to do double duty as HEXADECIMAL DIGIT A.

You could of course use one of the CIRCLED, DOUBLE CIRCLED,
FULL STOP or other "NUMBER" characters this way, but it
would probably be considered pretty nonstandard.

Makes me wonder what the procedure is for suggesting a new
code block or if it's already been proposed and rejected
for some reason.  I suppose a search on the site above would
probably reveal this.

> "Peter Hansen" <peter at engcorp.com> wrote in message
> news:3D112C60.9C3D2F9F at engcorp.com...
> > Thinkit wrote:
> > > It's a bit OT but does Unicode support the digits ten through fifteen
> > > (for hexadecimal)?
> >
> > Do you mean "does Unicode have unique glyphs representing the
> > hexadecimal digits ten through fifteen other than the standard
> > A, B, C... ?"
> 
> Yes, that's what I mean.  I looked at the spec and saw a lot of different
> numerals, including 1-20 for circled numbers.  Will have to examine it
> again.
> 
> > Unicode of course supports various glyphs for A through F, but
> > it has nothing to do with other representations of bases other
> > than ten and under, as far as I know.
> >
> > Not sure if that's exactly what you meant...

BTW...
Just in the spirit of being really pedantic: this post
confuses the term "glyph" (which should mean the graphical
representation of a character) with "character" which
should be used for the conceptual atomic element of
information. Unicode doesn't support *any* glyphs, just
characters -- the *font* supports glyphs.  What Peter Hansen
probably meant would be better phrased as "the glyph A may
be represented by various unicode characters".  Technically,
of course, this is only strictly correct when the character
A that I'm sending you is rendered into a glyph by your email
client and window manager (which actually might render
"LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A" and "CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER A"
as different glyphs, even though mine uses the same one).

Of course, this only matters if you want to speak Unicode
jargon -- the English language is more forgiving. ;-)

But I guess it is off topic after all.

Cheers,
Terry

-- 
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Terry Hancock
hancock at anansispaceworks.com       
Anansi Spaceworks                 
http://www.anansispaceworks.com 
P.O. Box 60583                     
Pasadena, CA 91116-6583
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