Philippe Verdy <verd...@wanadoo.fr> writes: > Ideally a smart text renderer could as well display that glyph with a > leading multiplication sign (a mathematical middle dot) and implicitly > convert the following digits (and sign) as real superscript/exponent > (using contextual substitution/positioning like for Eastern > Arabic/Urdu), without necessarily writing the 10 base with smaller > digits.
Actually, I would see this as putting unnecessary clutter back in! I would say the advantage of the ⏨ notation, introduced with Algol 60, is that it subsumes and makes implicit the multiplication and exponentiation operators, resulting in a visually compact denotation of a real number in “scientific notation”, and it does so with a single symbol that hints at its own meaning. I’ve used ⏨ a couple of times, without explanation, in my own emails—without, as far as I’m aware, causing any misunderstanding. > Without it, people will want to use 20⏨ to mean it is the decimal > number twenty and not hexadecimal number thirty two. Yes, this ambiguity is a drawback. Hopefully, the use cases should be sufficiently different that real confusion would be unlikely (and of course, normally, U+23E8 should never be used to denote decimal number base). -- Ian Clifton ⚗ ℡: +44 1865 275677 Chemistry Research Laboratory ℻: +44 1865 285002 Oxford University 📧: ian.clif...@chem.ox.ac.uk Mansfield Road Oxford OX1 3TA UK
