[Bidi] Shouldn't the "AL" bidi cathegory be named "AR"?

[Behdad Esfahbod]

On Sat, 28 Aug 2004, Beni Cherniavsky wrote:

> Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> > On Sat, 7 Aug 2004, Beni Cherniavsky wrote:
> >>I'm puzzled by the name of the "AL" bidi cathegory (see
> >>http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr9/#Bidirectional_Character_Types).
> >>If it's supposed to be a shorthand of "Arabic" it should have been named
> >>"AR".  If it's supposed to be a shorthand of "Arabic Right-to-Left", it
> >>again should have been "AR". Do I miss anything?  This cathegory is a
> >>variant of "R" and not "L", so naming it "AL" with no good reason is
> >>quite confusing!
> >>
> >>If it is indeed misnamed due to some historical accident, it should be
> >>possible to rename it in future editions of UAX 9.
> >
> > But you know that it stands for "Arabic Letter", right? ;-)
> >
> Er, well, that would explain it but it ain't intuitive.  "R" and "L"
> don't stand for "something Letter" ;-(.

That would become RL and LL which is worse.


--behdad
  behdad.org