RE: APL Under-bar Characters

<alexweiner at alexweiner dot com> wrote:

> Since it seems that all hope of adding characters is lost, I think the
> next best goal would be to try an reach some sort of semblance between
> the Unicode Consortium and a nebulous group of people (APLers) who
> really believe that the uppercase under-bar letters are atomic and
> different than an underlined uppercase letters.

This reminds me of an argument that has occasionally been made that
Unicode should encode Latin "majuscules" separately from "capital
letters" because the semantic functions of the two are different
(typographical choice vs. orthographic rule).

Unicode does not provide distinct encodings of "a" based on
pronunciation (chaos, cat, star). It does not provide distinct encodings
of "uppercase A" based on the reason for using the uppercase instead of
the lowercase (HAPPY, Adam). And it also does not provide distinct
encodings of "uppercase A with underline" based on the reason for
underlining the letter.

> Some sort of list, no matter how "unofficial", is better than no list
> at all, right? Wouldn't the Unicode Consortium be the place for such a
> list, such as in NamedSequences.txt ?

It is NOT necessary for a combining sequence to be assigned a name,
either by the Unicode Technical Committee or by anyone else, in order to
use it. Note that of the two sequences:

A̱ <0041, 0331>
A̲ <0041, 0332>

neither sequence is listed in NamedSequences.txt, yet I can use them
without limitation in this email and in plain text generally.

I'm not sure the general concept of combining sequences is well
understood in this thread.

--
Doug Ewell | http://ewellic.org | Thornton, CO 🇺🇸