Re: [emacs-bidi] Arabic implementation

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Alex Schroeder <address@hidden>
> Date: Fri, 09 Nov 2001 19:41:56 +0100
> 
> >> What I probably need is a string with all the characters in it which
> >> have the right to left property.  Would that be feasible?
> > 
> > If all the Arabic characters have the same category, you can use the
> > feature of char-tables where setting a single entry for the generic
> > character has the effect of setting it for the entire charset.  (I
> > thought that's why you've chosen category tables as the implementation
> > for this; I know that's why I suggested to use char-tables.)
> 
> Yes, if you look at the old table, I used this for the private arab
> charsets.  For hebrew however, it didn't seem right -- we can't just
> assume that all of hebrew-iso8859-8 is left to right.  That's why I
> assumed the same is true for arabic-iso8859-6, and it is obviously
> true for the unicode charsets.  So in the end, having the generic
> characters will not be that useful.  But I think the category
> machinery is already there, and I think that bidi categories look very
> much like the categories defined for phonetic classifications.  So it
> seemed right.

You will still want generic characters for some charsets which have
all their characters in the L category, no?

Anyway, I think we need a machinery to specify ctaegories or values in
char-table's for a range of characters.  This will be needed when we
switch to Unicode, since there are no charsets there.

For now, I agree that what you did is sufficient.

> BTW, I like this assignment you gave me.

Hey, I'm a great software team manager, when I put on that cap! ;-)