- From: Murray Sargent <murrays@exchange.microsoft.com>
- Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2015 22:20:36 +0000
- To: David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk>, William F Hammond <hammond@csc.albany.edu>
- CC: "www-math@w3.org" <www-math@w3.org>, "Asmus Freytag (t)" <asmus-inc@ix.netcom.com>, Michel Suignard <michel@suignard.com>
David Carlisle wrote that one could made definitions like >U+2102 DOUBLE-STRUCK CAPITAL C = Complex numbers > >Leaving U+1D53A free to be defined as a part of a generic alphabetic run as >MATHEMATICAL DOUBLE-STRUCK CAPITAL C One can't change the definitions of the math alphanumerics now since they are already encoded and Unicode has a stability guarantee. In addition they are widely used in technical documents as defined. We might have been able to get away with such definitions before the math alphanumerics were added to the Unicode Standard 3.1 back in March, 2001. For Microsoft Office apps, I wrote routines to work around the separation of the math alphabetics into the LetterLike Symbols and math alphanumerics blocks and it's complicated and even error prone. So I really wish that we had done something along the lines David suggests. But it's clearly water over the dam at this point. +Asmus and Michel in case they want to defend Unicode's position of not duplicating characters. I'd argue that simplicity of implementation should play an important role in this regard. This isn't the only place where Unicode is over unified. But these complications do provide ways to keep programmers employed <grin>. Murray
Received on Tuesday, 23 June 2015 22:21:12 UTC