Gosi wrote:
> On Mar 7, 8:58 pm, phil chastney
> <phil.hates.s...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>> Gosi wrote:
>>> On Mar 6, 2:53 pm, phil chastney
>>> <phil.hates.s...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>>>>> It will be interesting to see if people use Unicode to translate
>>>>> scientific mathematical notations directly to Apl.
>>>>> Has anyone tried that?
>>>> what exactly are you looking for here? some sort of 2-D input encoded
>>>> using Unicode, being interpreted in (or translated into?) APL,
perhaps?
>>> It was you who suggested that technical symbols could be used in
>>> Unicode.
>>>> companies with operations entirely within the English-speaking world
may
>>>> also find Unicode useful when they need to use a mathematical or
>>>> technical symbol or two, or even a quotation in Foreign (it adds so
much
>>>> _style_, don't you think?)
>>> That is why I asked if those symbols could be used to translate to Apl
>>> functionality
>> I'm still baffled
>>
>> Unicode is an encoding, it maps abstract characters and symbols to
>> hexadecimal values, nothing more (actually, there is a lot of ancillary
>> stuff as well, but we'll ignore that, pro tem)
>>
>> most known characters and quite a lot of technical symbols can be
mapped
>> to hexadecimal values using Unicode
>>
>> the technical symbols include every published APL symbol ever used in
>> any way
>>
>> it also includes just about every mathematical symbol the American
>> Mathematical Society could think of
>>
>> so a stream of mathematical symbols could be encoded using Unicode
>> values, and (if one exists) a semantically equivalent stream of APL
>> symbols could also be encoded using Unicode values
>>
>> I'm sure you knew that
>>
>> Unicode has no functional power, and in particular, it doesn't have
>> markup, so I should amend that earlier statement to "a _linear_ stream
>> of mathematical symbols..."
>>
>> a stream of mathematical symbols, with embedded markup (presumably
>> ASCII-only), could also be encoded using Unicode values
>>
>> conversion to a semantically equivalent stream of APL symbols could be
>> done by hand, or using a programming language[1], but I doubt very much
>> if a general solution exists
>>
>> so, yes, some 2-D mathematical expressions could be translated into
>> executable APL using only Unicode values, which is my present best
guess
>> at what you were asking
>>
>> and if I've misunderstood you, my apologies
>>
>> all the best . . . /phil
>>
>> [1] note that there is no requirement for the programming language to
>> know anything about Unicode -- Unicode 1.0 has a copyright date (c)
>> 1990, 1991 and at that time (before the introduction of w_char) some
>> people were already using unsigned ints to store Unicode values
>
> For example:
>
> \sum_{k=1}^{n}{a_k} means a1 + a2 + ... + an.
>
> Unicode sign 2211 and below it k=1 and above it n
it's important to keep your levels of detail clear here
"below it" and "above it" are layout specifications, and for that you
need markup, which is not part of an encoding scheme
there is another layout convention, which places "k=1" level with the
lower horizontal of the Sigma, and the "n" level with the upper horizontal
one convention is (normally) used for displayed formulae, the other for
inline for formulae (i.e, embedded in plaintext)
as Sam Sirlin has pointed out, there are various markup schemes
your chosen markup language may or may not support both conventions, but
your hypothetical translator surely must...?!
does that help? . . . /phil
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