Re: How to recognize keyboard insertion?

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

David De La Harpe Golden writes:
 > Eli Zaretskii wrote:

 > >>> For example, try typing "9*(4+5)" after switching to Arabic keyboard.
 > >>> What do you get?
 > >>
 > >> 9*)4+5(
 > > 
 > > Which is wrong, don't you think?
 > 
 > It's clearly not a valid arithmetical expression... It is however how 
 > mature bidi capable apps I tried behave, for better or worse.

I think you should name the apps, so that people can judge for
themselves whether those are "generally high quality" implementations
if they have experience with them.  I'm only interested in bidi in an
academic sense, but I see an analogy to development of MUA features
for handling mailing list traffic.  Many "mature" MUAs impose
substantial user pain because they don't recognize the RFC 2369
List-Post header as a signal to prefer to reply to list, although that
header was standardized in 1998, and making this the default would
essentially eliminate all demand for Reply-To munging.  (Eg,
Thunderbird 3 finally got this feature in the "Reply" button but it is
still not bound in the key shortcuts.)

It's possible that (like reply to list) the current audience of Emacs
would prefer to learn context-dependent typing idioms for mirrored
characters in bidi rather than be able to use the same "logical"
sequence of keystrokes for "9*(4+5)" regardless of context.  OTOH,
that may be a barrier to reaching a new audience.

An advanced algorithm certainly should be the default in betas.