On 3/9/2016 7:08 PM, Oren Watson wrote:
Correct.
As a matter of history, the characters that would have gone into those gaps were already encoded. The stated purpose for alphanumerics in math is to serve for variables. For example, that means they are not intended to be used as list markers, which would have been a use case for which a contiguous range would be essential. Variable names are not usually indexed, but if they must show up in sorted lists, any capable sort algorithm can be set up so the weights make them contiguous across the gap (if the UCA tables do not do that by default already, perhaps it's worth ensuring that they do).
The original case for the Ångström as for the Kelvin was that is has been encoded twice in some other standards. The historical mistake was to not code them as part of the "squared" abbreviations, because that's where they came from, in the mistaken belief that it would be generally useful to have these and not the regular Å and K for the units. None of that applies to the alphanumerics, so it's good to have avoided the duplicate encoding.
I believe UTC tends to avoid gaps, but will leave them if the circumstances of the case warrant that. In this case, not leaving gaps and silently skipping already encoded characters, would have had the effect of misleading user into expecting a complete alphabet, so the gap was the less-bad alternative. A./ |
- Gaps in Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols Oren Watson
- Re: Gaps in Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols Asmus Freytag (t)
- Re: Gaps in Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols Oren Watson
- Re: Gaps in Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbo... Andrew West
- Re: Gaps in Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols Doug Ewell
- Re: Gaps in Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols Andrew West
- NamesList.txt as data source (was: Re: Gaps... Ken Whistler
- Re: NamesList.txt as data source (was: ... J. S. Choi
- Re: NamesList.txt as data source Asmus Freytag
- Re: NamesList.txt as data sour... Oren Watson
- Re: NamesList.txt as data ... Ken Whistler
- annotations (was: NamesList.txt as data... Janusz S. Bień