Re: An Aburdly Brief Introduction to Unicode (was Re: Perception ...)

[Kenneth Whistler]

Peter said:

> As I indicated above, I think that there is a non-vacuous notion that
> merits a specific term for the purposes of discussion, and that that notion
> is the one I have been assuming up to now.

And that is (abstract character)1, as I clarified earlier. I agree with
you, Peter, that Mark may have overstated the case for the vacuity of
the notion that SC2 defined for "character". It is precisely to cover
those "things" that get encoded in character encoding standards,
whether they be elements of text or of information control (hence
ASCII printable characters plus ASCII control characters, at its
simplest).

But we need a separate term for (abstract[able] character)2, which
is what Mark was trying to point to -- one of those "things" that
you "recognize one when you see one" as an appropriate element of
a writing system for encoding in the UCS and which exist prior to
any determination of actual encodings of "that which has been encoded".

--Ken