(It might be Sinhalese.) A somewhat-casual conversation with a local Sri
Lankan convenience store owner brought out that Tamil characters (iirc
(Sinh.?)) are (sometimes?) considered to be arranged in a 16-by-16 matrix,
iirc consonants in columns and vowels in rows. This fellow knows something
about computers, so the magic 256 was not arbitrary in one sense. It might
be worthwhile to ask further.

I went back home, got a good cloth shoulder bag, and carried Unicode 3.0
over to his store and showed him the Tamil and Sinhalese code charts. He
found them quite interesting. He didn't know the traditional Tamil
numerals, and probably not those glyphs for small powers of 10. I should
have been sure to explain that some Unicode characters are for scholarly
use.

--
Nicholas Bodley |=@=| Waltham, Mass.
Permanent, but troublesome: <nbodley@...>
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