Michael Everson wrote as follows.
>I think, William, you ought to read the TR on the character-glyph >model many times because it's clear that you want to use character >encoding, even private-use character encoding, for things that have >nothing to do with character encoding. I have now had the opportunity to study the document. In Annex B Characters there is the following definition for a character. quote A member of a set of elements used for the organisation, control, and representation of data. end quote There is then mention of data characters and control characters, including the use of the word usually. It seems to me from that definition that codes for 36 POINT and GREEN and so on are well within that definition. Indeed, that definition shows that codes such as 36 POINT and GREEN are but on the sea shore as far as goes what a character could be used to represent. Consider for example a code point for LET THERE BE A TRIANGLE and a code point for LET THERE BE A QUADRILATERAL and a code point for LET THE NEXT CLOCKWISE VERTEX BE REPRESENTED BY THE FOLLOWING SYMBOL (where any Unicode character can then be used to represent that vertex in that item) and so on. Codes such as JOIN THE PREVIOUSLY DESIGNATED VERTICES REPRESENTED BY THE FOLLOWING TWO SYMBOLS and so on could be defined, thus allowing a computer to produce a picture and also have a data structure which has knowledge of the mathematical structure of the picture. It would seem that it would be entirely within the letter and the spirit of that definition to use code points in regular Unicode to denote all manner of items for human and computer communication. The potential uses for pure mathematics, artificial intelligence and psychology are enormous. Uses for computer aided design are also possible. William Overington 27 June 2002
