Re: Empty set

[Stephan Stiller]

Hi Philippe,

    i.e. "(...)." at end of a truncated sentence or ". (...)" at
    start of the next truncated sentence
    Well, for citations in German I've generally seen "[...]", and for
    English I've seen both "[...]" and "...", but not "(...)".
I included it them in my sentence ("parentheses or braces") even if I 
simplified the list of examples (it was intended that you could 
substitute them). Ideally yes square braces are better, except if 
there are other punctuation braces in which the citation is enclosed. 
In some rare cases rounded braces may be seen as well i.e. "{...}".
"braces" in English means just { }. Aside from the context of 
programming languages, braces are _rare_ in English and German outside 
of math, to the point they'll look esoteric; in ordinary math you see 
them only for sets. Anecdotally people in Germany always tell me of a 
mythical parenthesis-bracket-brace hierarchy { [ ( ) ] }, which I've 
never actually encountered, and btw even the hierarchy [ ( ) ] isn't 
used by everyone. And before you get back to me: I don't consider 
Poisson brackets (mentioned by Ilya) to be ordinary math.

    [...] EXCEPT if theses dots are separated by extra spaces (larger
    than the extra inter-letter spacing on the same line, in case of
    justification in a column of text between fixed left and right
    margins)
    Now /that/ is a /good/ argument for providing a separate ellipsis
    glyph.

I don't think so : the ellipsis shoud still use the **same** extra 
inter letter spacing in justified lines as between letters within 
words to make the texxt more visually balanced.
That providing a special font-dependent ellipsis glyph can/will prevent 
the ellipsis dots from being affected by typographic tracking was my 
point, right? :-) And the exact spacing of the ellipsis dots in relation 
to ordinary inter-word spacing and in relation to closed-up dots varies 
(and note that most ellipsis glyphs look more like "..." than ". . .", 
so this interestingly makes a stylistic choice for you already); as far 
as what you wrote is a prescription, it's not crazy, but I don't see why 
it should be absolute or which authority or principles it'd be coming from.

dots in rulers
But I wasn't talking about dotted rules or <hr>-like text elements at all.

Stephan