From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Wed Sep 03 2003 - 11:14:12 EDT
At 06:52 -0700 2003-09-03, Peter Kirk wrote:
>>
>>I don't know what these floor and ceiling things are. I don't
>>recognize them as "half square brackets" and neither do the
>>specialists. Are these supposed to be half square brackets? ...
>
>Well, apparently so, from reading the Unicode 4.0 code charts. Maybe
>we need to disunify in a later version, but that's what the standard
>is for now.
Don't worry. The scholars aren't using them anyway so there won't be
any disunification cost.
>... Why weren't they encoded as punctuation? Why don't they have
>names that reflect that in any way?
>
>There are plenty of other misnamed characters. :-(
Ah, but one of my minions (laughs hysterically) has pointed out the
following to me:
>The CEILING brackets are (most commonly) used to denote the ceiling
>function in math. The FLOOR brackets are similarly (most commonly)
>used to denote the floor function in math.
>
>Look at the bottom half of page 4 (the one numbered 4, not counting
>the pages before 1...) of
>http://www.chl.chalmers.se/~kentk/LIA/lia2-draft-ed2.pdf.
>This is conventional mathematical usage.
>
>They are used predominantly in math expressions.
Hence, these characters have perfectly correct names for their
function. And they are completely different from the half-brackets.
The floor and ceiling characters are the same height as a square
bracket just without one of the feet.
>The name police didn't know what they were? ;-)
The Name Police don't know anything whatsoever about mathematics as
ye well know. (Floor and ceiling function indeed. I suppose there is
an attic and basement function, and a tornado-storm-cellar function?)
>>Right square bracket has a general category of Ps.
>>Right parenthesis has a general category of Ps
>>Right ceiling has a general category of Sm
>
>Looks like an inconsistency which can be resolved in two ways:
>1) Add new punctuation characters and leave these ones as symbols;
Yes!
>2) Adjust the categories of these ones to Ps.
No!
>And what about bidi mirroring?
These should function just like the square brackets.
-- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
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