From: Jill.Ramonsky@Aculab.com
Date: Tue Aug 19 2003 - 05:00:02 EDT
Yeah, I know. But like I said, who uses this?
I have a QWERTY keyboard in front of me. I use a standard en-GB key mapping.
Now I _could_ customise my keymap such that Right-Alt + HYPHEN MINUS yielded
MINUS SIGN. Wouldn't that be great? Then I could write things like "x = -5;"
unambiguously. But it would completely screw my C++ compiler.
And I also have to ask ... if I am actually WRITING a C++ compiler, should I
allow the use of MINUS SIGN to mean minus sign? (Actually, that question may
be answered by the specification of C++, so let's push it a bit further. If
I am inventing some successor language to C++, and am free to invent my own
specification, should I _then_ allow the use of MINUS SIGN?)
I'm not being Devil's advocate. I don't necessarily even expect anyone to
have a definitive answer. I only ask that the charts make clear what each
character is FOR, in sufficient detail that the answer to questions like the
above becomes obvious.
Jill
-----Original Message-----
From: John Cowan [mailto:jcowan@reutershealth.com]
Sent: Monday, August 18, 2003 4:39 PM
To: Jill.Ramonsky@Aculab.com
Cc: unicode@unicode.org
Subject: Re: Clones (was RE: Hexadecimal)
> U+2212 (minus sign) - an obvious clone of U+002D (hyphen-minus). Who
> uses this?
The ASCII characters, because they have had to do double or triple
duty over the years when we had a very limited 7-bit character set,
often have several near-equivalents in Unicode that disambiguate their
*typographically* different purposes. Thus hyphen, minus sign, en dash,
and em dash have separate Unicode representations, though in ASCII they
are often written -, -, -- or -, and --- or -- respectively.
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