[gizmo686]

Hebrew is still written sequentially in Unicode. The right-to-left aspect there is simply about how the characters get displayed. On mixed documents, there is U+200E and U+200F to change the text direction mid stream.

From the perspective of a LLM learning from Unicode, this would appear as a delimeter that needs to be inserted on language direction boundaries; but everything else should work the same.

[Timwi]

I know I'm being pedantic, but I just want to point out that even U+200E/U+200F are generally not needed. If you put a Hebrew word in the middle of an English sentence, it displays correctly all by itself. This is due to the Unicode bidirectional algorithm, which defines a super sensible default behavior. You only need the RTL control characters in weird circumstances, perhaps ones involving punctuation marks or unusual uses of special characters.

[cubefox]

> Hebrew is still written sequentially

Everything is written sequentially in the sense that the character that is written first can only be followed by the character that is written next. In this sense writing non-sequentially is logically impossible.

[dotancohen]

An older Hebrew encoding actually encoded the last character first, then the penultimate character, then the character preceding that, etc.

Exercise to the reader to guess how line breaks, text wrapping, and search algorithms worked.

[goatlover]

Multiple characters can be written at once, they can also be done in reverse or out of order.

[cubefox]

No no, the second character you write must always be temporally preceded by the character you wrote first. Otherwise the second wouldn't have been the second, but the first, and moreover, the first would have been the second, which it wasn't.

[Someone]

You could write multiple characters simultaneously. CRTs sort-of did that, for example, starting characters with ascenders before those without and finishing the characters without descenders before those with descenders.

So, in the word “gif”, they would start writing the “f” first and finish writing the “i” first (just before writing the last part of the “f”. For “if”, writing the “f” would start before writing the “i” started and finish after writing the “i” finished.

In traditional printing “writing” can happen simultaneously for an entire page, but colour printing can make things more complex.

[dotancohen]

I encourage you to find some place that still uses a Hebrew typewriter. When they have to type numbers, they'll type the number in backwards. And an old Hebrew encoding also encoded characters in reverse order.

[short_sells_poo]

I think parent just means that "backwards" is a relative term. Your backwards is someone else's "forward". For someone who is used to reading Hebrew, they would be used to reading right to left and this would seem completely natural, no?

Basically, the numbers 1234 and 4321 are identical assuming one is written left to right and the other is right to left. Then it's just a convention which way you are used to reading.

I know nothing of Old (or New) Hebrew unfortunately so I may be completely off base.

[gowld]

No, because Hebrew words are read right-to-left in Hebrew letters, but numbers are read left-to-right in Arabaic numerals. The direction of reading switches mid-sentence, but typewriters only type in one direction.