Amen. If we wanted to define separate codepoints for all the important math
and science symbols, we'd need another surrogate plane. Such definitions
are really at a higher level than plain text.
Murray
> -----Original Message-----
> From: kenw@sybase.com [SMTP:kenw@sybase.com]
> Sent: Monday, December 01, 1997 2:03 PM
> To: Multiple Recipients of
> Subject: Pi Constancy
>
> >
> > This is why GREEK SMALL LETTER PI is used for 3.14... and why that
> > important number doesn't have its own encoding? I always felt that it
> was
> > weird that such an important number was left as a letter while so many
> > others were not.
> >
>
> Of course, if we went down that route, we would also need a
> separate gamma for the Euler-Masheroni constant 0.577215664.. and who
> knows how many other magical numbers the mathematicians come up with.
>
> And getting physical constants in, like Planck's constant, was
> just the result of them having special forms encoded as characters
> in XCCS, not because we liked those particular ones and didn't like the
> Gravitational constant G, Avogadro's constant L, the Boltzmann
> constant k, the Rydberg constant R, the speed of light c, or any number
> of others.
>
> Besides, do we really want a character encoding to get involved in
> determining whether "e" represents the mass of an electron, the
> charge of an electron, or Euler's constant?
>
> --Ken
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