Re: Three simple questions

[Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>]

The Ludwig Family <ludwigs@bellsouth.net> writes:

> For example, take the letter s:
>   as lower case, upright, not bolded, it means second (unit of time);
>   as upper case, upright, not bolded, it means siemens (unit of 
>      electrical conductance);

[...]

> Of course programming languages, indeed even Unicode, don't (and at 
> least for the foreseeable future won't and even can't) make such 
> distinctions, so we have to spell out our identifiers to make them 
> more meaningful within the constraints of character sets for 
> programming languages.

In fact, there's a proposal for an Unicode extension which will add
additional math alphabets (upright, italic, bold, script, Fraktur...).
Nevertheless, I think it's a good idea not to exploit these new
possibility when you're trying to write reliable software.  If $s$
becomes $S$ in a mathematical publication, most readers will hopefully
be able to interpret it correctly anyway, but machines can't do this
(unless there is some kind of type information which happens to be
contradicting).