Could Unicode deliver the level of paleographic detail needed for encoding ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs?

[William_J_G Overington]

James Kass wrote:
 
 
>  So it would be the better practice to first determine how the user 
> community is handling any issue before devising any mark-up scheme 
> just because somebody might consider it useful some day.
 
 
Well, I tend to think of my suggestion in this thread of being like how 
a development in pure mathematics is often before an application for 
that development is found.
 
 
So, yes, I am putting this suggestion forward because I consider, indeed 
hope, that it might be useful at some future time. At present it is just 
a suggestion in a thread in the Unicode public mailing list. Maybe it 
will never be more than that. Yet I have put the idea forward and people 
are welcome to apply it in practice if they so choose. If I had not put 
it forward then encoding the level of paleographic detail in a Unicode 
encoding that this system could achieve might have been considered 
impossible. 
 
 
Actually, what I am suggesting in this thread is a small subset, with 
the addition of Gr and Gm to that small subset, of a theoretical 
software system using tag characters that I devised some years ago and 
which is featured in a chapter (Chapter 9 in case anyone is interested) 
of my first novel, which was written from time to time from June 2016 to 
February 2019. The commands Gs, Gh, Gv and G+ are all mentioned in that 
chapter.
  
  
The full list of data types in that chapter is as follows.
  
I Integer
 
D Double precision floating point
 
B Boolean
 
H Character
 
S String
 
Z Complex
 
Q Quaternion
 
P Point, as in a font, a point is a triple of two Integers and a Boolean
 
C Contour, a sequence of P items
 
G Glyph, a sequence of C items
 
and L is used for commands for the Link flag.
 
 
 
If applied then there may need to be a few additions so as to have 
colour font capability.
 
 
The virtual machine can have its own temporary storage for each data 
type, so it will be possible to use commands such as tag characters Gp 
and Gg to put into and get from respectively of a memory structure in 
the virtual machine.
 
 
For example,
 
 
3Gp would put a copy of the contents of the ag register into mg[3] in 
the virtual machine.
 
  
mg[3]:=ag;
 
  
It all goes back to some research that I carried out in the year 2000.
 
  
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/14560000.htm
 
 
I have been influenced by the FORTH computer language, which was 
originally devised to control the motors of a telescope in an 
observatory.
 
  
William Overington
  
  
Wednesday 6 March 2024
  
 
 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://corp.unicode.org/pipermail/unicode/attachments/20240306/5d10b887/attachment.htm>