I can't comment on the usability of any alphabet other than Latin, but
is it "fair" that Chinese ideograms chew up tens of thousands of code
points in Unicode? All the while Latin only needs a few dozen even when
you throw in the accents and umlauts?

William J. Kammerer
Novannet
Columbus, OH 43221-3859 • USA
+1 (614) 487-0320

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Carlisle" <davidc@n...>
To: <david.lyon@c...>
Cc: <xml-dev@l...>
Sent: Friday, 04 March, 2005 07:08 AM
Subject: Re: [xml-dev] [About Unicode] Why the symbol LOGICAL NOT is
missing from the UCS ?



> I've never heard of those...

I take it you are not a mathematician.

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.


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?.

> 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.

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:-)