On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 9:05 AM, Marko Rauhamaa <ma...@pacujo.net> wrote:
> Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com>:
>
>> On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 4:14 PM, Mark H Harris <harrismh...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>> Π¹ = pi
>>
>> That's good! (Although typing Π¹ quicker than pi is majorly pushing it.
>
> It don't think that's good. The lower-case letter π² should be used. The
> upper-case letter is used for a product, although unicode dedicates a
> separate character for the purpose: ∏³.
>
> I often see Americans, especially, confuse upper and lower-case letters
> in symbols ("KM" for "km", "L" for "l" etc).“L” is actually valid, and so is “l”. This happens mainly because humans (and computers) tend to write “1 l” (one liter, one-ell) in a way that makes it harder to distinguish (becoming eleven or ell-ell), especially if you don’t include the space (which is invalid). On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 9:23 AM, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote: > If you can type a capital ∏³, you can type a lower-case π², unless there's > something very weird going on. Nitpick time! (because we all love it so much!) Π¹ = U+03A0 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER PI π² = U+03C0 GREEK SMALL LETTER PI ∏³ = U+220F N-ARY PRODUCT “If you can type an N-ARY PRODUCT, you can type a GREEK SMALL LETTER PI, unless there’s something very weird going on.” …like, the user is in the past and is using ISO 8859-7 (instead of a 21st-century encoding, like UTF-8). An encoding which has support for Π¹ and π², but not for ∏³… (of course, this assumes that, if we add those new characters into python, we allow any encoding, somehow.) That’s not too weird, other than the ancient encoding being used. (though that’s a bit less weird on Windows, but that’d be Windows-1253.) Oh: and speaking of fancy Unicode characters that are worthless ~duplicates, spot the difference here: µ μ If you are lucky enough (and, luckiness may involve reading this e-mail in Helvetica (not Neue though) on a Mac), you can clearly see that they are different. If you are using a font that does not differentiate them, you may think they’re the same. If you ask some intelligent software (like `unicodedata.name()` in Python), you’ll quickly find out the first is MICRO SIGN, and the other is GREEK SMALL LETTER MU. Such craziness is what makes Unicode Unicode. -- Chris “Kwpolska” Warrick <http://kwpolska.tk> PGP: 5EAAEA16 stop html mail | always bottom-post | only UTF-8 makes sense -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
