>
> This is why GREEK SMALL LETTER PI is used for 3.14... and why that
> important number doesn't have its own encoding? I always felt that it was
> weird that such an important number was left as a letter while so many
> others were not.
>
Of course, if we went down that route, we would also need a
separate gamma for the Euler-Masheroni constant 0.577215664.. and who
knows how many other magical numbers the mathematicians come up with.
And getting physical constants in, like Planck's constant, was
just the result of them having special forms encoded as characters
in XCCS, not because we liked those particular ones and didn't like the
Gravitational constant G, Avogadro's constant L, the Boltzmann
constant k, the Rydberg constant R, the speed of light c, or any number
of others.
Besides, do we really want a character encoding to get involved in
determining whether "e" represents the mass of an electron, the
charge of an electron, or Euler's constant?
--Ken
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:38 EDT