Why incomplete subscript/superscript alphabet ?

Hello all,

I wonder why only a subset of the alphabet is available as subscript
and/or superscript ?

This is well illustrated on the table in the following Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_superscripts#Latin_and_Greek_tables

Is there a reason for this ?

I would love to have these characters available because I often use
Unicode to write equations as comments of a source code. For instance:

     class Term_diff_rotDivStressTensor_splitted
     /**
      * Computes:
      *
      * μ ⎛μ⎞ ⎡1 ⎤
      * —.Δω + ∇⎜—⎟×Δu + ∇×⎢—.(∇u + ∇uᵀ)·∇μ⎥
      * ρ ⎝ρ⎠ ⎣ρ ⎦
     */
     {
         [...] (class definition)
     }

or a more problematic example:

     /*
      * ⌠tᵉⁿᵈ
      * q(tᴺ) ← q(t⁰) +⎮ rhs(q,t) dt + (tᵉⁿᵈ - tˢᵗᵃʳᵗ)
      * ⌡tˢᵗᵃʳᵗ
     */

Here "end" and "start" would have been better as subscripts, but I could
not do so because letter "d" is not available as a subscript…

As you can see, having only some letters available as subscript (&
superscript) is sometimes a pain…

Gaël Lorieul

PhD student in Computational Fluid Dynamics
at Université catholique de Louvain
Received on Fri Sep 30 2016 - 09:43:14 CDT