From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,66bc6b039f1e005d X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Florian Weimer Subject: Re: Three simple questions Date: 2000/10/16 Message-ID: <878zrov93g.fsf@deneb.enyo.de>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 682373699 References: <2BED68CA963D6D55.A78776F656DA0452.75A61ED22116F1B6@lp.airnews.net> <39e2588f.21565740@news.demon.co.uk> <39E2D51E.D0122F20@bton.ac.uk> <8s0b78$2no$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <8s8jmo$qt0$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <39EA448C.28DF1A2C@bellsouth.net> Organization: Enyo's not your organization Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Mime-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 2000-10-16T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: The Ludwig Family 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).