Otto Stolz <Otto.Stolz@uni-konstanz.de> wrote:
>
> On Jul 11, 0:11, Alain LaBonté wrote:
> > And it takes what it takes to have the EURO SIGN in 8-bit technology,
>
> Yet, I deem it utmost unfortunate that the standard committee has sacri-
> ficed the Plusminus Sign, of all characters -- thus abandoning the aptnes
> of ISO 8899-n for most technical and scientific texts.
>
> [...]
> The proposed «+-» is not an adequate fall-back, as this sequence,
> though rarely used, has already a fixed mathematical meaning, quite
> different from «±»; and even, if a reader would deduce the intended
> meaning, «±», from the context, «+-» in lieu of «±» will hurt a
> physicist's æsthetic feelings at least as much as «oe» in lieu of
> an o-e ligature a Francophone's.
>
I think 8859-0 is a great idea. Once businesses all over Europe see
their financial reports marked with ±, making their accounting reports
appear to be full of error estimates, and technical specialists see
their data end up looking like expense reports, everyone will be
screaming for Unicode. ;-)
Creating an alternative to Latin-1, the world's most popular 8-bit
encoding, that is just close enough to it that mistakes will be easy to
make and hard to catch before they show up in embarrassing places, will
so effectively ruin the reputations of both Latin-0 *and* Latin-1 that
Unicode will be demanded by everyone.
Bravo 8859-0! Viva Unicode!
__Glen__
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