At 10:06 AM 1/18/02 -0700, Robert Palais wrote:
>Which seems to make Unicode a defender of the status quo. Inaction is
>as political as action. "We are holders of the standards
>for the technology for encoding symbols, and we won't admit new symbols
>until they are widely used..." not necessarily the intent, but possibly
>the impact - that evolution of symbolic communication will be hampered?
What is missing from this position is a recognition of the *irreversability*
of character encoding. Symbols that do not have established use (no matter
how worthwhile they are) have a frighteningly high risk of never becoming
accepted - meaning that a code position has been used up and cannot ever
be used for something that people actually use (whether now or later).
Furthermore, there is a small cost of 'carrying a character on the books',
as each character added will incrementally grow the size of support files
that Unicode implementations will need. Carrying such costs for rarely used
characters, is a tradeoff people find acceptable. Carrying the cost (for
ever) for 'oops we don't need this one after all' mistakes, is acceptable
to no-one. Untested innovations have a better than 0 chance of being in
the latter category.
Mathematics is a field where ad-hoc notation is rampant (esp. in new
sub-disciplines) and experimentation abounds. Unicode usually waits until
there is evidence that a notation has settled before adding the new
symbols. While this won't eliminate the chance that some symbols become
obsolete over time, it does ensure that there always is a body of
historical texts using that symbol - so a character would at a minimum
have historical significance and be used by historians of science re-
producing older papers. An untested innovation does not have even
that saving grace.
None of these arguments invalidate the *mathematical* reasoning behind
the desire to adopt a better notation. Physicists have long done that
by defining hbar to be h over 2pi, reducing three symbols and a fraction
into one. Once the new '2pi' has been used in enough mathematical
monographs it will become a prima facie candidate for review for new
encoding, like all new mathematical notation - but not before then.
A./
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jan 18 2002 - 13:43:17 EST