sure but originally they were in ascii just ( and ) and not some generic opener and closer
I did not mean ASCII ... in the 8-bit encodings for Arabic that built over ASCII (ISO 8859-6, Windows-1256, etc.) there also was a single couple of parentheses, and I don't think they had a different meaning as in Unicode ... I couldn't find the exact reference (the ISO 8859-6 text sells for 70 Swiss Francs on the ISO site, and the only specification Microsoft provides on his site is the character table -- http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/sbcs/1256.mspx), but HTML pages I find on the Web tend to indicate that in Arabic text encoded in Windows-1256, the character '(' (byte 0x28) was really used as an opening bracket, and ')' as a closing one. Maybe people on the list from Arabic-speaking countries, Israel or Iran can tell us more (in particular, what do one type on a standard keyboard to input an opening bracket?). Arthur