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I'm curious... do people who read right to left languages code that way as well? } (y = x)fi ;("!dlrow olleH")nltirp.tuo.metsyS { How about top to bottom la

• beagle3 17y ago
  There is (AFAIK) one programming language that is RTL -- a variation on Basic which has been dead for about 15 years now. The open-paren / left-paren problem is there even in e.g. Word, explictly _because_ it's considered open-paren rather than left-paren; When you type 'alif' (arabic 'a' equiv) 'ba' (arabic 'b' equiv) shift-9 (left paren), you get ')' 'ba' 'alif' . but if you type 'a' 'b' shift-9, you get 'ab('. if you insert a different directionality character immediately in fromt of the open-paren, the paren will be flip. The rules for flipping parens are specified in the Unicode standard, and are extremely nontrivial and nonintuitive (both for implementing and for using -- it's often hard to get the kind of character you want!). And it all exists because some idiot thinking "abstraction! It is an open-or-close that the person means, not the left-or-right!" was sitting in the committees making the decisions; There _was_ dissenting opinion, giving exactly the example I gave above, but abstraction was deemed way more important than usability.