From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Wed Sep 03 2003 - 13:11:11 EDT
On 03/09/2003 08:14, Michael Everson wrote:
> At 06:52 -0700 2003-09-03, Peter Kirk wrote:
>
>>>
>>> I don't know what these floor and ceiling things are. I don't
>>> recognize them as "half square brackets" and neither do the
>>> specialists. Are these supposed to be half square brackets? ...
>>
>>
>> Well, apparently so, from reading the Unicode 4.0 code charts. Maybe
>> we need to disunify in a later version, but that's what the standard
>> is for now.
>
>
> Don't worry. The scholars aren't using them anyway so there won't be
> any disunification cost.
>
>> ... Why weren't they encoded as punctuation? Why don't they have
>> names that reflect that in any way?
>>
>> There are plenty of other misnamed characters. :-(
>
>
> Ah, but one of my minions (laughs hysterically) has pointed out the
> following to me:
>
>> The CEILING brackets are (most commonly) used to denote the ceiling
>> function in math. The FLOOR brackets are similarly (most commonly)
>> used to denote the floor function in math.
>>
>> Look at the bottom half of page 4 (the one numbered 4, not counting
>> the pages before 1...) of
>> http://www.chl.chalmers.se/~kentk/LIA/lia2-draft-ed2.pdf.
>> This is conventional mathematical usage.
>>
>> They are used predominantly in math expressions.
>
>
> Hence, these characters have perfectly correct names for their
> function. And they are completely different from the half-brackets.
> The floor and ceiling characters are the same height as a square
> bracket just without one of the feet.
>
>> The name police didn't know what they were? ;-)
>
>
> The Name Police don't know anything whatsoever about mathematics as ye
> well know. (Floor and ceiling function indeed. I suppose there is an
> attic and basement function, and a tornado-storm-cellar function?)
>
>>> Right square bracket has a general category of Ps.
>>> Right parenthesis has a general category of Ps
>>> Right ceiling has a general category of Sm
>>
>>
>> Looks like an inconsistency which can be resolved in two ways:
>> 1) Add new punctuation characters and leave these ones as symbols;
>
>
> Yes!
>
>> 2) Adjust the categories of these ones to Ps.
>
>
> No!
>
>> And what about bidi mirroring?
>
>
> These should function just like the square brackets.
OK, I think I agree with you now. But this change needs to be
implemented quickly before the scholars do start using them. For each
scholar like Paul who asks this list before using the characters, there
may be many who read the standard and start doing what it tells them to
do, even if they don't much like the glyphs. In fact it is probably
already too late as that note has been printed in thousands of copies of
Unicode 4.0.0 and even it gets reversed in 4.0.1 people will continue to
find it in the printed book and follow it.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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