On Friday 04 March 2005 07:08 am, David Carlisle wrote:
> > I've never heard of those...
>
> I take it you are not a mathematician.

Nah... I cheated in my calculus exams... I had one of those Sharp
handheld computers.. which I programmed it to solve integral
calculus.... doing the assembly language was more fun than
doing the math...

> I don't read Arabic (or Hebrew or Russian or Chinese or several other
> languages that don't use a latin alphabet), so I wouldn't
> comment on the usability of the symbols used in those languages.
> mathematics uses a very rich alphabet, perhaps you don't read
> mathematics, which is fine, but in that case you probably shouldn't
> comment on the usability of its alphabet.

Yeah but sweeping generalisations are always a great way to
start the most interesting of conversations.....

> for example
>
> http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2200.pdf
>
> (the upside down A for "forall" is the first character on that chart)
>
> > it's not so much about like or dislike... but rather doing markup in such
> > a way that the xml can easily handle what we do most...
>
> It's odd that you should say that as I thought you were proposing a data
> format that looked a bit like XML but unable to be read by XML parsers
> due to unescaped &'s?.

Do they crash do they...? that's a pity... :-)

> > and for many that is transporting business data around the place.
>
> the original poster gave no indication that was what he was doing.
> It was a perfectly reasonable question.
> he had used LOGICAL AND and LOGICAL OR (which by the way look like ^ and
> v more or less) presumably in a mathematical expression and was looking
> for the not operator so searched for it (in vain) under the name
> LOGICAL NOT which wasn't a bad guess. But the Unicode names of
> characters (even characters used for expressing logic) have more to do
> with history than logic and so this character is called NOT SIGN
> so he didn't find it, hence the posted question.

Fascinating stuff....

> David
> (Co chair of the W3C Math Interest Group, and co editor of the MathML
> spec, so I have an interest in using Mathematical symbols in XML
> documents:-)

Now it makes sense......

I can still markup formulas easy enough......

<Newton>
 Formula&="F=M*A"
</Newton>

but I won't go any deeper... only embarass myself with my ignorance.

My only trailing comment is to say that xml markup is in itself a type
of formula language. Or, more accurately, it is a form of expression not so 
much for the question, but rather the results.

<Impact>
 Force#=345
 Scale&="KPa"
</Impact>

Best Regards

David

-- 
Computergrid : The ones with the most connections win.