----- Original Message ----- From: "John Chambers" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, July 23, 2003 5:25 PM Subject: Re: [abcusers] New draft special characters
> I. Oppenheim writes: > | > | > (c) Why is £ \243? While I can of course implement it, it makes no > | > sense. Ascii £ is 156. > | > > From the iso_8859-1 man page: > > Oct Dec Hex Char Description > ... > 243 163 A3 £ POUND SIGN > ... > 251 169 A9 © COPYRIGHT SIGN > > > One problem we seem to have is that people use \ followed > by digits to mean octal, decimal, or hexadecimal. This is > an ongoing point of confusion. There is, of course, a > totally standard way that mathematicians indicate the > numeric base, but since we can't do subscripting in plain > text, we can't use it. There's a long tradition of software > packages and programming languages using similar notation > for all three bases, but interchanging their meanings. We > could establish a standard abc way of indicating the base, > and in fact a fair amount of abc software uses \243 to mean > octal 243. But most of our users are not programmers, and > they are using all sorts of software on all sorts of > systems. So they will always be using whatever notation is > "standard" with the software they're familiar with, and we > will always be fighting this problem. Why not allow \x## to denote hexadecimal? and \x#### to allow unicode as well > To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html > To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
