From: Hans Aberg (haberg@math.su.se)
Date: Wed Apr 20 2005 - 12:00:19 CST
At 08:18 -0700 2005/04/20, Peter Constable wrote:
>I know of entire ranges of characters (one of them quite large) that
>some would like to reckon this way. It wouldn't be appropriate to
>actually list them, however.
One such range are the mathematical monospace characters. The idea
was to use them in computer code. The error here is the that of not
analyzing the underlying semantics sufficiently. In math, changing
styles usually changes the math semantics, because it is used to
indicate different logical objects. For example, "sin" in plain or
boldface would mean different things, as opposed to say the natural
language English, where the semantics is the same word "sin". Now, in
computer code, the semantics does not change either, styles are only
used to make the code more legible. For example, a computer language
would not accept "sin" in both plain and boldface, and assign
different meanings to the two words. In addition, the monospace style
is simply a style that somehow became common in some quarters when
writing computer code. Perhaps one wanted to get the code nice
aligned in columns, or emulate teletypes. But in several computer
science books, monospace is not at all used in order to indicate
computer code.
Now, we discussed through this, I recall, in 2002, or something. We
then noted that these characters were in fact added in error, but
that they could not be deleted, in view of Unicode's stability
requirement. Nobody felt at that time it was controversial. Their
addition do not disturb Unicode as whole -- if you do not like them,
simply do not use them. On the other hand, now that these are
available, somebody might find a correct, semantic use for these
monospace characters.
So, quite on the contrary, I think it is good that these bloopers are
listed. Then, one day, if somebody wants to design linguistically
more accurate character sets, these lists can of use. The main
purpose of the current Unicode character set is to provide them so
that most human written text can be semantically represented in a
computer, and I do not see that these bloopers are affecting that
intent. Finding linguistically correct character sets, it seems me,
is a much harder problem, much beyond that more limited scope that
Unicode apparently has with its current character set.
-- Hans Aberg
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