UAX #9: applicability of higher-level protocols to bidi plaintext

[philip chastney via Unicode]

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On Tue, 17/7/18, Richard Wordingham via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org> wrote:

> Subject: Re: UAX #9: applicability of higher-level protocols to bidi plaintext
> To: unicode at unicode.org
> Date: Tuesday, 17 July, 2018, 3:30 AM

> An interesting ambiguity is "!True" v. "True!".  
> "!True" can be read as "Not true".
 
true - there are contexts where "!True" can be read as "Not true".

it's unclear from the short sample given whether "True" is a variable name,
or a Boolean constant, but there are other contexts where  "True!" 
can be read as "the factorial value of True" 

and yet others where where "!True" can be similarly interpreted

there are also contexts where "Hello World!" can be read as 
the function "Hello", applied to the factorial value of "World"

even though such a move wouldn't necessarily remove all ambiguity,
the easiest solution is to declare that formal notations cannot be "plain" text

use a higher-level protocol to identify what formal notation is being used, perhaps,
except that I remember a conference where one of the paricipants noted that 
fully one-third of the time allocated to each presentation was taken up 
explaining the presenter's notation

/phil