Meroitic cursive fractions numerical values

[Andrew West]

On 28 March 2015 at 20:05, Karl Williamson <public at khwilliamson.com> wrote:
>
> Existing software that looks at the numeric values of characters is written
> expecting that rational numbers will have been reduced to their lowest form.

That seems to be a rather rash statement. I have software (BabelPad)
which parses the numeric values of characters for numeric sorting
purposes, and it parses "6/12" for MEROITIC CURSIVE FRACTION SIX
TWELFTHS as 0.5. Personally I find it hard to imagine how you could
write software that accepts "6/12" as input and is unable to come up
with the answer of a half.

I would say that fractions should not be reduced to their lowest form
in the Unicode data as some people may need to order fractions by
numerator or denominator, and reducing to lowest form could break the
expectations of some software.  Having said that, I note that the
numeric value of one character has been reduced in the Unicode data:
U+2189 VULGAR FRACTION ZERO THIRDS is given the numeric value of "0"
rather that "0/3".

Andrew