Jim Allan wrote: ...One may note the common use of the greater-than and less-than signs as
angle brackets in many publications
Just because < and > are in ASCII, the have been used as approximations.
That was the origin of this practice.
However the practice is found now in professional technical publishing as a matter of choice, for example in modern linguistics and in Backus-Naur notation where the more normal angle brackets are certainly available for use.
including the Unicode standard. I don't think that necessitates coding separate characters.
Yes, it does: 27E8;MATHEMATICAL LEFT ANGLE BRACKET;Ps;0;ON;;;;;Y;;;;; 27E9;MATHEMATICAL RIGHT ANGLE BRACKET;Pe;0;ON;;;;;Y;;;;;
(Despite the name, you can use them outside of math expressions.)
You also have the (mathematical): 2991;LEFT ANGLE BRACKET WITH DOT;Ps;0;ON;;;;;Y;;;;; 2992;RIGHT ANGLE BRACKET WITH DOT;Pe;0;ON;;;;;Y;;;;;
But: 3008;LEFT ANGLE BRACKET;Ps;0;ON;;;;;Y;OPENING ANGLE BRACKET;;;; 3009;RIGHT ANGLE BRACKET;Pe;0;ON;;;;;Y;CLOSING ANGLE BRACKET;;;; are for CJK use.
I am quite aware that these are encoded. Angle brackets are also to be found in the well known and widely available Adobe symbol character set employed in various Symbol fonts and I have used them.
But the GREATER-THAN and LESS-THAN signs sometimes continue to be used *by preference* for angle brackets even when angle bracket glyphs are available.
For an example, from http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.0.0/Preface.pdf under *Sequences*:
<< A sequence of two or more code points may be represented by a comma-delimited list, set off by angle brackets. For this purpose angle brackets consist of U+003C LESS-THAN-SIGN and U+003E GREATER-THAN-SIGN. Spaces are optional after the comma, and U+ notation for the code point is also optional—for example, “<U+0061, U+0300>”. >>
The common *deliberate* use of LESS-THAN and GREATER-THAN for angle brackets does not require that clones be encoded in Unicode for that use.
Similarly the convention that I and some others use of sometimes indicating quoted text in email or on forums by "<<" and ">>" does not require any new encoding symbols in Unicode.
Symbol characers often have multiple and inconsistant usage without ceasing to be the same characters.
Jim Allan
