Square Brackets with Tick

Richard Wordingham richard.wordingham at ntlworld.com
Tue Aug 25 14:07:35 CDT 2015


On Tue, 25 Aug 2015 09:54:29 +0100 (BST)
William_J_G Overington <wjgo_10009 at btinternet.com> wrote:

> Richard Wordingham wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, 24 Aug 2015 11:00:32 +0100 (BST)
> William_J_G Overington <wjgo_10009 at btinternet.com> wrote:
> 
> >> Looking at the document
> >> http://www.unicode.org/L2/L1999/99159.pdf
> >> that has been mentioned, the four bracket characters are therein
> >> described as follows. 
> 
> >> 4X1F O LEFT BRACKET, REVERSE SOLIDUS TOP CORNER
> >> 4X20 C RIGHT BRACKET, REVERSE SOLIDUS BOTTOM CORNER
> >> 4X21 O LEFT BRACKET, SOLIDUS BOTTOM CORNER
> >> 4X22 C RIGHT BRACKET, SOLIDUS TOP CORNER
> >> So it looks like the pairings in Unicode today are as originally
> >> intended.

> > How so?

> I was simply observing that the original pairings had the
> first-listed pair of brackets listed using REVERSE SOLIDUS and had
> the second-listed pair of brackets listed using SOLIDUS contrasting
> that clear pairing of the brackets with the use, in the encoding into
> Unicode, of TICK in the listing for each of the four of the bracket
> characters that are being discussed in this thread.

You said the 'pairings in Unicode'.  With the exception of decimal
digits, the scalar values of assigned characters have no *formal*
relationship to their interpretation.  The scalar values are about as
significant as the difference between canonically equivalent
non-Greek, non-Korean sequences.  At best the different sequences give a
hint of what the author thinks about the character.  For example U+00E9
LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE suggests it may be though of as a
character, while <U+0065, U+0301> suggests that it may be two
characters - the diacritic could be a length mark or a tone.  The
distinction is not to be relied upon - normalisation would obliterate
it.

Richard.


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