Two Greek characters variants are fairly often used together in the same
math doc. People just want more Greek characters than there are. E.g.,
both epsilons (straight and script), both phis, both thetas can all appear
in the same document. One thing you learn studying mathematical docs is
that people do things routinely that you might expect to be nonexistant. I
don't personally know of any mathematical expression that uses the final
sigma, but I bet Barbara Beeton can find one. Furthermore, we'd need to
reserve the location to keep case switching simple. The current layouts are
tightly related to those in the BMP, so that the algorithms can be used with
a minimum of changes.
Murray
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Scott Horne [SMTP:shorne@metaphasetech.com]
> Sent: Thursday, July 01, 1999 5:47 PM
> To: Unicode List
> Cc: Unicode List
> Subject: Re: Superscript asterisk
>
> > The Greek characters are A-Omega and alpha-omega, plus 6 or seven
> > variant characters that tend to get used in Math.
>
> Why bother with variants? Anyone who uses, say, printed and script
> pi (rho, phi, beta, theta, kappa, epsilon, whatever) in the same text
> deserves the confusion that will inevitably result, whether the
> variants are available to him or not.
>
> Also, final sigma is never used in math. Nor are digamma, koppa,
> sampi, &c, unless you're preparing mathematical texts that use
> ancient Greek numeration.
>
> Scott Horne
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