Michael Everson wrote as follows.
>I think, William, you ought to read the TR on the character-glyph
>model many times because it's clear that you want to use character
>encoding, even private-use character encoding, for things that have
>nothing to do with character encoding.
I have now had the opportunity to study the document.
In Annex B Characters there is the following definition for a character.
quote
A member of a set of elements used for the organisation, control, and
representation of data.
end quote
There is then mention of data characters and control characters, including
the use of the word usually.
It seems to me from that definition that codes for 36 POINT and GREEN and so
on are well within that definition.
Indeed, that definition shows that codes such as 36 POINT and GREEN are but
on the sea shore as far as goes what a character could be used to represent.
Consider for example a code point for LET THERE BE A TRIANGLE and a code
point for LET THERE BE A QUADRILATERAL and a code point for LET THE NEXT
CLOCKWISE VERTEX BE REPRESENTED BY THE FOLLOWING SYMBOL (where any Unicode
character can then be used to represent that vertex in that item) and so on.
Codes such as JOIN THE PREVIOUSLY DESIGNATED VERTICES REPRESENTED BY THE
FOLLOWING TWO SYMBOLS and so on could be defined, thus allowing a computer
to produce a picture and also have a data structure which has knowledge of
the mathematical structure of the picture.
It would seem that it would be entirely within the letter and the spirit of
that definition to use code points in regular Unicode to denote all manner
of items for human and computer communication. The potential uses for pure
mathematics, artificial intelligence and psychology are enormous. Uses for
computer aided design are also possible.
William Overington
27 June 2002
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