On Mon, 7 Aug 2000 12:04:11 +0300, Roman M . Parparov wrote:
>I wrote a WWW mail program with hebrew support once. Pain in the ass to
>invent and reinvent functions for printing Hebrew correctly. Moreover, a
>lot of self-written reversing and replacing reduces the performance from
>what it would be if we just had it implemented in the core of Perl.
That doesn't sound like it should be. The start of a sentence should
come first, i.e. substr($_, 0, 1) should return the first character.
Whether this should appear on the left or on the right of the screen, is
not Perl's concern.
Granted, I've heard of primitive output devices which a re blissfully
unaware of the correct graphical output of such text strings, and which
would print them from left to right anyway. But a silly patch that
remedies the symptoms while ignoring the underlying false assumptions,
does not seem right.
What if you encounter a display device that correctly displays Hebrew
text from right to left?
--
Bart.
