Re: Too narrowly defined: DIVISION SIGN & COLON

Mark Davis ☕, Tue, 10 Jul 2012 17:35:10 -0700:
> The main point is that asserting a general preference in an
> annotation for ∶ to express a ratio, as Asmus had in his formulation,
> is simply wrong and counterproductive. (We are not going to change
> the world's usage from : to ∶ by fiat; and and the glyphic difference
> is quite subtle, and missing in a great many fonts. Compare that with
> the difference between hyphen-minus and minus, which is much more
> pronounced, and much better carried across fonts.)

Roughly ASCII has become some sort of MarkDown.

> The most that we could say is that in certain mathematical contexts ∶
> is preferred to : for expressing ratios, not that it is generally
> preferred.
> By the way, here's your list with visible characters instead of the U+'s. 

When I switch my mail program to use Times New Roman, then all variants
are distinguishable, though the asterisks are a little hard to separate.

> - HYPHEN-MINUS 
> − MINUS SIGN 
>
> / SOLIDUS (Unicode 1.0 called it "SLASH") 
> ∕ DIVISION SLASH 
>
> \ REVERSE SOLIDUS (Unicode 1.0 called it "BACKSLASH") 
> ∖ SET MINUS 
>
> * ASTERISK // you had U+003A = :  instead of *.
> ∗ ASTERISK OPERATOR 
>
> ◦ WHITE BULLET 
> ∘ RING OPERATOR 
>
> • BULLET 
> ∙ BULLET OPERATOR 
>
> | VERTICAL BAR 
> ∣ DIVIDES 
>
> ‖ DOUBLE VERTICAL BAR 
> ∥ PARALLEL TO 
>
> : COLON 
> ∶ RATIO 
>
> ~ TILDE 
> ∼ TILDE OPERATOR 
>
> · MIDDLE DOT 
> ⋅ DOT OPERATOR

-- 
Leif H Silli