Proposing new arrow characters with Bidi_Mirrored=Yes

[Mark E. Shoulson]

On 4/8/25 1:24 PM, Asmus Freytag via Unicode wrote:
>
> Without a solid body of evidence of where the current approach is 
> failing for lack of a solution that requires new characters, the issue 
> remains stuck in the category of "good idea". Something that looks 
> like it might be useful, but with obvious complications that would 
> make it a terrible idea unless these are outweighed by real, practical 
> and demonstrable gains (and for which no other alternative exists).

Indeed, an excellent point, and one that's easy to forget (for me, 
apparently).  We get a lot of "wouldn't it be cool if...?" ideas, but 
Unicode (ideally) doesn't work based on what would be cool, but what 
would be useful, or even better, what is already used.

I suppose the question by the OP qualifies as some sort of "evidence" 
for the utility of the proposal: someone thinks it would be useful.  
"Evidence" is obviously too strong a word here. More that it shows where 
evidence would need to be: are there examples of situations where this 
would be useful, and more useful than not doing anything?

> Users just type what gives them the correct appearance. (In Arabic, 
> that infamously includes typing the wrong character, because it 
> happens to look correct and is on your regional keyboard). 

Which is what led me to wonder if mirrored characters were a good move 
to begin with.  Why wouldn't you just type the character that looks like 
what you want??  Are there really situations where someone as "A→B" and 
it somehow needs to be automatically copypasted and transmuted to an 
environment where it has to read א←ב?  But the same argument could be 
made regarding all mirrored characters, so why do we have them?  
Probably because for things like parentheses, there is utility in being 
able to recognize start-parens from end-parens regardless of 
directionality.  And at least as importantly, because we have them 
already for better or worse and we're not changing.  Is that about right?

Can OP maybe give some ideas of how such arrows would be used (more than 
"seems useful")?  After all, if you're typing "Convert A→B and assign 
C←D" or you're typing "המר א←ב וקבע ג→ד", either way you know what 
you're typing and which direction the arrows should go.

(I still feel like "arrows (and some other things) should get mirrored 
while under the influence of a Directionality Override" could be a cool 
(and possibly disastrous) idea, but at this point only an "it would be 
cool if" idea and not one with actual support to act on.  Might be a 
solution if examples are actually found.)

~mark