On Feb 21, 2009, at 2:43 PM, John Cowan wrote: > Guillermo J. Rozas scripsit: > >> Yes, absolutely, but why should we distinguish on the bases of 'case' >> and not 'font'? They are different glyphs after all. > > Well, since you asked, here comes another gratuitous Unicode infodump. > > Unicode does, in fact, support the semantic distinctions made in > mathematical text by font. Thus there are complete 52-character > alphabets > for mathematical use only in the following fonts: italic, bold, > script, > Fraktur, double-struck (aka "blackboard bold"), sans-serif, monospace, > bold italic, bold script, bold Fraktur, sans-serif italic, sans-serif > bold, and sans-serif bold italic. In addition, there are mathematical > Greek alphabets in bold, italic, bold italic, and sans-serif bold, > and digit sets in bold, double-struck, sans-serif, and sans-serif > bold. > Finally, there are left-to-right versions of alef, bet, gimel, and > dalet > for mathematical use. > > Of course, the fate of those who use these characters for non- > mathematical > purposes is written in the Book of Unicode: tenfold shall be their > damnation, and there shall be no rebirth.
And one of the main reasons why mathematics are hard for people to follow is because of its terseness. APL also uses an extended character set for terseness. Why? Because of transmission costs, not because it makes it easier to read. Case is very close to that. The only difference being that it has been in use longer, as we've had handwriting for a long time, but printing presses for only 500+ years. _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
