"Alain LaBont/e'/ SCT" wrote on 1997-07-09 03:33 UTC:
> Extract of the latest proposal for "Latin 0":
> ŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻ
> In order to maintain maximum compatibility with the existing world, a
> maximum number of Latin 1 characters should be used as the model for this
> new table (the most used table to currently support French partly and
> Finnish partly). The following characters have been identified as having no
> or very little use in ISO/IEC 8859-1:
>
> 10/06 BROKEN BAR
> 10/08 DIAERESIS (standalone, spacing character)
> 11/01 PLUS-MINUS SIGN (SIGNE PLUS-OU-MOINS)
> 11/04 ACUTE ACCENT (standalone, spacing character)
> 11/08 CEDILLA (standalone, spacing character)
> 11/12 VULGAR FRACTION ONE QUARTER
> 11/13 VULGAR FRACTION ONE HALF
> 11/14 VULGAR FRACTION THREE QUARTERS
You have already heard the protest on various mailing lists against,
declaring the PLUS-MINUS SIGN as little used and claiming on the other side
that the CURRENCY SIGN is of any practical value.
If I remember correctly, the argument was that in some ancient business
software applications, it has become common to abuse the international
currency symbol as a field separator or as a symbol for subtotal.
The story behind this seems to be a little bit different. According to
C. E. Mackenzie's Book "Coded character sets : history and development",
chain printer manufacturers used to put a character that was called
"lozenge" on their chains in the 1960s, and that seems to have ended up
in Unicode today as SQUARE LOZENGE U+2311. The lozenge was used occationally
for the metioned purposes: field separation and subtotal indication.
As the diagram that I append below shows, the lozenge from those days
(on the left side) is clearly a very different symbol from the international
currency sign that you see on the right in the diagram. If someone has
carried over the functions that were in the early days of data processing
associated with the lozenge to the currency sign, just because the currency
sign is otherwise useless and has some resemblence to the lozenge,
then this does not justify in my opinion to throw out the very useful
plus/minus and keep the only abused currency symbol.
Markus
-- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Science grad student, Purdue University, Indiana, USA -- email: kuhn@cs.purdue.edu
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