At 10:06 AM 1/18/02 -0700, Robert Palais wrote: >Which seems to make Unicode a defender of the status quo. Inaction is >as political as action. "We are holders of the standards >for the technology for encoding symbols, and we won't admit new symbols >until they are widely used..." not necessarily the intent, but possibly >the impact - that evolution of symbolic communication will be hampered?
What is missing from this position is a recognition of the *irreversability* of character encoding. Symbols that do not have established use (no matter how worthwhile they are) have a frighteningly high risk of never becoming accepted - meaning that a code position has been used up and cannot ever be used for something that people actually use (whether now or later). Furthermore, there is a small cost of 'carrying a character on the books', as each character added will incrementally grow the size of support files that Unicode implementations will need. Carrying such costs for rarely used characters, is a tradeoff people find acceptable. Carrying the cost (for ever) for 'oops we don't need this one after all' mistakes, is acceptable to no-one. Untested innovations have a better than 0 chance of being in the latter category. Mathematics is a field where ad-hoc notation is rampant (esp. in new sub-disciplines) and experimentation abounds. Unicode usually waits until there is evidence that a notation has settled before adding the new symbols. While this won't eliminate the chance that some symbols become obsolete over time, it does ensure that there always is a body of historical texts using that symbol - so a character would at a minimum have historical significance and be used by historians of science re- producing older papers. An untested innovation does not have even that saving grace. None of these arguments invalidate the *mathematical* reasoning behind the desire to adopt a better notation. Physicists have long done that by defining hbar to be h over 2pi, reducing three symbols and a fraction into one. Once the new '2pi' has been used in enough mathematical monographs it will become a prima facie candidate for review for new encoding, like all new mathematical notation - but not before then. A./