Yeah, I know. But like I said, who uses this? I have a QWERTY keyboard in front of me. I use a standard en-GB key mapping. Now I _could_ customise my keymap such that Right-Alt + HYPHEN MINUS yielded MINUS SIGN. Wouldn't that be great? Then I could write things like "x = -5;" unambiguously. But it would completely screw my C++ compiler.
And I also have to ask ... if I am actually WRITING a C++ compiler, should I allow the use of MINUS SIGN to mean minus sign? (Actually, that question may be answered by the specification of C++, so let's push it a bit further. If I am inventing some successor language to C++, and am free to invent my own specification, should I _then_ allow the use of MINUS SIGN?) I'm not being Devil's advocate. I don't necessarily even expect anyone to have a definitive answer. I only ask that the charts make clear what each character is FOR, in sufficient detail that the answer to questions like the above becomes obvious. Jill -----Original Message----- From: John Cowan [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, August 18, 2003 4:39 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Clones (was RE: Hexadecimal) > U+2212 (minus sign) - an obvious clone of U+002D (hyphen-minus). Who > uses this? The ASCII characters, because they have had to do double or triple duty over the years when we had a very limited 7-bit character set, often have several near-equivalents in Unicode that disambiguate their *typographically* different purposes. Thus hyphen, minus sign, en dash, and em dash have separate Unicode representations, though in ASCII they are often written -, -, -- or -, and --- or -- respectively.
