From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Tue Oct 12 2010 - 20:11:10 CDT
Asmus,
> >> I'm curious if any thought was given to this, and what code points I'm
> >> missing in my analysis.
> > U+1D452 MATHEMATICAL ITALIC SMALL E (or merely U+0065 LATIN
> > SMALL LETTER E), also used for Euler's number. See also U+2147.
>
> Now you are confusing Euler's constant - also depicted with U+03B3 GREEK
> SMALL LETTER GAMMA, with the natural exponent.
Actually I'm not confusing the two -- which is why I wrote
Euler's number, not Euler's constant. Perhaps I misplaced
"also" in the sentence, but I was referring here to 2.718...
not to 0.57721...
> That kind of confusion is
> really not helpful
Hehe. Well, it wasn't me, but mathematicians who took to calling
these things Euler's number and Euler's constant confusingly.
Check the wikis. ;-)
> and is what drives people like Karl to ask for
> numeric property values in the first place - to unambiguously define
> what these symbols were encoded for.
>
> The proper place to document that, without introducing a formal
> property, is with additional nameslist annotation for a few characters.
I disagree. Because that just further cements the notion that
these characters *are* the constants. We keep going around on
this, both about mathematical values and about confusion of
characters with units of SI, as well.
> I suggest that you add the correct value for Euler's constant as a
> comment and cross reference that character it to 03B3
>
> 0.57721 56649 01532 86060 65120 90082 40243 10421 59335 93992
>
> should be approximate enough...?
>
> At the same time you could add a comment e ≈ 2.718 for 212F - Again, not
> to document the value, but to make clear, beyond the character name,
> what constant the alias for 212F denotes.
Nah, I don't think those are helpful here.
Maybe the UTC would disagree with me. ;-)
--Ken
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