In message <9711281918.AA03595@unicode.org> Doug Ewell recently said:
> As I read this, I keep thinking about U+03C2 GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL
> SIGMA and U+03C3 GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA. If I am not mistaken,
> these are indeed just presentation variants, and there is indeed a
> straightforward rule (end-of-word) to determine which glyph should be
> displayed. So, strictly speaking, this principle would seem to point
> to the unification of U+03C2 and U+03C3 (and several similar pairs in
> the Hebrew block, for that matter).
There is a straight forward rule for Greek, as you state. But applying
this as a default could cause problems when Greek letters are used
in mathematics. Sigma is used in statistics to represent standard
deviation. I'm surprised Unicode doesn't have a separate code point
for this considering its obsession with U+2126 micro sign, U+00B5 ohm sign,
U+2135 alef symbol (Hebrew, not Greek) etc. Perhaps it's because the others
are designators / constants rather than variables.
Tim
-- Tim Partridge. Any opinions expressed are mine only and not those of my employer
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