Yesterday, I wrote about Learn to program the gradual way: Welcome to Hedy! and today is the next installment: about numerals.
[Archive] /Fay-lee-nuh/ (@Felienne) | Twitter kind of by surprise discovered that the ten numerical digits of the decimal numeral system used in virtually all programming languages are not the original Arabic forms.
Supporting other forms of decimal numerals will help learning to program when your background is non-English or even using ten systems outside the Arabic numeral realm so common in Latin alphabets. And they are a fun learning exercise for every body too!
Some of the related Tweets on this:
- [Archive] /Fay-lee-nuh/ on Twitter: “You know those things 0 to 9 that we call Arabic numerals?! The actual Arabic language uses different ones* But of course, we support that now too!!! * Fun fact I did not know until embarrassingly recently…”
- [Archive] Hedy on Twitter: “Turns out different languages not only have different words and letters but also…. numbers!! So to make sure Hedy works really well for all languages we need to do a “bit” of work! …”
- [Archive] Hedy on Twitter: “Can’t believe how little I knew about other languages and cultures before all this!”
- [Archive] Hedy on Twitter: “Tadaaaaaa! …”
- [Archive] Hedy on Twitter: “Turns out different languages not only have different words and letters but also…. numbers!! So to make sure Hedy works really well for all languages we need to do a “bit” of work! …”
- [Archive] Peter Bindels 💉💉💉⏳ on Twitter: “@Felienne Unicode actually has like 62 different numbering systems that use some form of a 0-9 symbol. And about 5 that use a non-0-9 system of counting.” (spoiler: Felienne knows)
- [Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers on Twitter: “@dascandy42 @Felienne Looking for numer and number in … shows a few categories that I think are now missing from .. (which is already a huge leap forward)” / Twitter (this blog post has some notes so I might be able to create a pull request later)
Some more related Wikipedia links:
- Numeral – Wikipedia
- Numeral system – Wikipedia
- Numeral (linguistics) – Wikipedia
- Numerical digit – Wikipedia
- Decimal – Wikipedia
- Arabic numerals – Wikipedia
- Spread of the Latin script – Wikipedia
- Numerals in Unicode – Wikipedia
- List of Unicode characters – Wikipedia
- Unicode block – Wikipedia
- Number Forms – Wikipedia
- Enclosed Alphanumerics – Wikipedia
- Common Indic Number Forms – Wikipedia
- Aegean Numbers (Unicode block) – Wikipedia
- Ancient Greek Numbers (Unicode block) – Wikipedia
- Coptic Epact Numbers – Wikipedia
- Rumi Numeral Symbols – Wikipedia
- Sinhala Archaic Numbers – Wikipedia
- Cuneiform Numbers and Punctuation – Wikipedia
- Mayan Numerals (Unicode block) – Wikipedia
- Counting Rod Numerals (Unicode block) – Wikipedia
- Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols – Wikipedia
- Indic Siyaq Numbers (Unicode block) – Wikipedia
- Ottoman Siyaq Numbers (Unicode block) – Wikipedia
- Enclosed Alphanumeric Supplement – Wikipedia
- Number Forms – Wikipedia
- Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols – Wikipedia
- Unicode – Wikipedia
In the Unicode pages, look for “numeral”, “number”, and “numeric” (or just for “num”).
–jeroen
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