Re: Naming of functional ASCII characters in Unicode

From: John Cowan (jcowan@reutershealth.com)
Date: Mon Jun 05 2000 - 14:16:37 EDT


Kenneth Whistler wrote:

> Here is where you are introducing a problem. In programming languages,
> single quotes are indicated by pairs of U+0027, just as double quotes
> are indicated by pairs of U+0022. They do *not* pair U+0060 with
> U+0027 to form a left and right quote. That usage is a widespread
> email convention -- not a formal language syntax convention.

Well, the m4 language uses it, and so does TeX; it is not a purely
human-to-human convention. So it is not
too surprising that Unix screen fonts often pair ` and '.

> Further detailed specification of character properties is the way
> the Unicode Technical Committee clarifies distinctions between usages
> of characters -- not by fiddling with their names.

Exactly so.

Trust us, there are far worse names than these; names with SMALL
in them that don't represent lower-case letters, and the abominable name
LATIN LETTER OI, which represents no sort of "oi".

-- 

Schlingt dreifach einen Kreis um dies! || John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com> Schliesst euer Aug vor heiliger Schau, || http://www.reutershealth.com Denn er genoss vom Honig-Tau, || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan Und trank die Milch vom Paradies. -- Coleridge (tr. Politzer)



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:21:03 EDT