On 30 Jun 99, at 12:35, Asmus Freytag wrote:
> In the case of ASTERISK, the analysis that is needed, and that, as far as
> I have seen, has not been made, is to present evidence that cases exist
> (or are easily conceivable) where *both* the ASCII asterisk and yet
> another asterisk are needed in the same text, and with consistent
> distinction in use or formatting.
My first thought was APL. I was then surprised to discover that
there doesn't seem to be an APL asterisk, although there are
composite APL characters such as "Apl Functional Symbol Circle Star",
which oddly enough are not listed as compositions. (Oddly, at least
because historically these characters were keyed by the user
explicitly typing one base character, a backspace, and the other
base.)
On 30 Jun 99, at 10:56, Kenneth Whistler wrote
> And the function is obviously quite variable in plain text:
> Multiplication: 2*4=8 (this is the one addressed by U+2217,
> clearly)
> Exponential: 2**10 (varies with 2^10, and shown with formal
> superscripting
> in properly typeset mathematics)
And in APL, 2*4=16, i.e. the * indicates exponentiation. But surely
the * in 2*4=8 was not known to conventional mathematical notation,
but was introduced in the 1950s by FORTRAN in the absence of a small
x or suitable dot that could be distinguished from a letter or
decimal separator respectively.
So back to the top: I think quoting APL expressions, particularly in
the context of more conventional mathematical notation, may be a case
for multiple asterisks. But I know little of the history of
incorporation of APL characters into Unicode, so I may be way off
base.
Tony H.
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