APL Under-bar Characters

[David Starner]

On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 8:03 PM <alexweiner at alexweiner.com> wrote:

> Pierpaolo,
>
> You make a very good observation. You are essentially asking the question
> that began the whole discussion. This is covered in depth in the gnuapl
> mailing list. You can go their archive, and just search my name :)
>
> Since it seems that all hope of adding characters is lost, I think the
> next best goal would be to try an reach some sort of semblance between the
> Unicode Consortium and a nebulous group of people (APLers) who really
> believe that the uppercase under-bar letters are atomic and different than
> an underlined uppercase letters.
>

There are many languages, particularly Native American languages, given
written form in the typewriter era that use letters with under-bar as part
of their alphabet. And the underbar is no different from the cedilla, the
acute and grave accents, the umlaut or many other modifiers used to make
new characters in languages across the globe. There are single code-point
versions of characters like ä, but that's historical coincidence, and they
are equivalent to the two code-point versions. Arguing atomicity is missing
the point; A̲ is as atomic as Ä in Unicode's eyes.
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