> On 8 Oct 2016, at 12:03, Julian Bradfield <jcb+unicode_at_inf.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> I happen to think the whole math alphabet thing was a dumb
> mistake.
They are useful in mathematics, but other sciences may not use them.
> But even if it isn't - and incidentally in some communities
> there is or was a convention of using blackboard bold letters for
> matrices, which justifies all of them -:
The double-struck letters are popular among mathematicians.
>> I believe the same logic applies to the case of linguistics, where the use
>> of superscripts are a common convention.
>
> Either superscripts are being used mathematically, in which case you
> can use mathematical markup, …
The principle for adding stuff to Unicode, I think, was that the semantics should be expressible in a text-only file, modulo what the technology is able to express.
For math, it is not known exactly what is required to express it semantically. TeX treats it as syntactic markup, for example, for superscripts and subscripts on the left hand side, and tensor component notation.
Rendering technologies have evolved, though, so from that point of view, more would be possible today.
Received on Sat Oct 08 2016 - 08:29:59 CDT
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