From: Gregg Reynolds (unicode@arabink.com)
Date: Fri Jul 01 2005 - 14:33:48 CDT
Chris Jacobs wrote:
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gregg Reynolds"
> <unicode@arabink.com> To: "'Unicode'" <unicode@unicode.org> Sent:
> Friday, July 01, 2005 6:34 PM Subject: sub and superscripts
>
>
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> For programming language design it would be nice to have the entire
>> Latin (ascii) and Greek repertoire available as subscript and
>> superscript characters. So for example, using ^ to indicate
>> superscript and _ to indicate subscript,
>>
>> i^foobar = i to the foobar power i_foobar = index foobar places
>> into the array i
>
>
> Array indices in programming languages can be nested:
>
> i_foo_bar = the foo_barth place in array i
>
>
>> Any chance of this happening?
>
>
> No chance, for this an infinite number of chars would needed to be
> added to unicode.
>
Good call; I had only been thinking of single-level subscripting (i.e.
string indexing, not multi-dimensional arrays). Nonetheless, encoding
infinite characters is not the only way to solve this. I'm not sure
what the best solution would be, but I would observe that Unicode is
capable of accomodating e.g. bidi-override marks and various similar
"characters"; so why not a <subscript> and <popsubscript> mark, for example.
Still, may main question is just about single level sub/superscript
characters. I would think the entire scientific community would find
latin/greek sub/superscript plaintext quite useful. If subscript i
deserves encoding, why not the rest of the alphabet. Of course, ideally
all characters would be available as sub/superscripts; but you have to
draw a line somewhere, and the latin and greek scripts are arguably as
close to universal as it gets for the sciences.
Anyway, what happens now if you have two or more consecutive subscript
characters? They don't subscript each other, at least not in the
editors I've used.
thx,
gregg
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