Why incomplete subscript/superscript alphabet ?

[Gael Lorieul]

Hello all,

I wonder why only a subset of the alphabet is available as subscript
and/or superscript ?

This is well illustrated on the table in the following Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_superscripts#Latin_and_Greek_tables

Is there a reason for this ?

I would love to have these characters available because I often use
Unicode to write equations as comments of a source code. For instance:

     class Term_diff_rotDivStressTensor_splitted
     /**
      * Computes:
      *
      *     μ       ⎛μ⎞        ⎡1              ⎤
      *     —.Δω + ∇⎜—⎟×Δu + ∇×⎢—.(∇u + ∇uᵀ)·∇μ⎥
      *     ρ       ⎝ρ⎠        ⎣ρ              ⎦
     */
     {
         [...] (class definition)
     }


or a more problematic example:

     /*
      *                    ⌠tᵉⁿᵈ
      *     q(tᴺ) ← q(t⁰) +⎮   rhs(q,t) dt  +   (tᵉⁿᵈ - tˢᵗᵃʳᵗ)
      *                    ⌡tˢᵗᵃʳᵗ
     */

Here "end" and "start" would have been better as subscripts, but I could
not do so because letter "d" is not available as a subscript…

As you can see, having only some letters available as subscript (&
superscript) is sometimes a pain…


Gaël Lorieul

PhD student in Computational Fluid Dynamics
at Université catholique de Louvain