Emacs & Hebrew

[Omer Zak]

On Fri, 2012-06-15 at 11:08 +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > From: Omer Zak <w1 at zak.co.il>
[... a pathological example was snipped ...]
> > In which BiDi reordering would leave the software developer very
> > confused if he wants to figure out into which glyphs do 'q' and 'v' get
> > translated.  Or which glyph was the original for ':'.
> 
> We could have specially-formatted comments, or some other way, to tell
> the display engine not to reorder a certain portion of the source
> code.  Once selective reordering is available, it would be easy enough
> to use it in such ways to cover special cases.  We already have
> similar features via file-local variables, 'coding' tags, etc.
> 
> The main point is that we should not punish 90% of use cases for the
> sake of the other 10%.  Holding a feature because it only handles 90%
> of use cases is a bad call, IMO.

With this I agree, as long as it is possible to deal with the other 10%
with just one extra command or another equally simple&easy solution.

The other BiDi-enabled text editors horribly fail in this.  They provide
no built-in way to disable reordering of mixed directionality text.
This horror is a good reason for me, Nadav etc. to be worried about
ability to turn off BiDi reordering at will.

--- Omer


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