Re: ASCII convention


Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
> Christopher Culver wrote:
>
> > I have always understood that graphemes are supposed to be marked up
> > with angle brackets ("<w> represents a semivowel in English").
>
> Do you mean angle brackets or the characters "<" (less than sign) and
> ">" (greater than sign), which you actually used? They are quite
> different, in appearance and by their properties as characters in
> standards. Angle brackets are typically larger and have an obtuse angle,
> and they are classified as punctuation characters, whereas "<" and ">"
> are classified as mathematical operators. The angle brackets are mainly
> used in mathematics, creating a need for clearly distinguishing them
> from the operator symbols.
>

fine, but when forced to stick to ASCII "less than" and "greater than",
i.e. < ... > sounds OK.

> Angle brackets do not belong to ASCII, of course, and they are somewhat
> difficult to produce in most programs, and printing or display could be
> a problem, too. It also debatable which characters you should for angle
> brackets, since Unicode has several pairs of characters that might be
> interpreted as angle brackets in some sense. It is understandable that
> "<" and ">" are widely used instead of them, but they really _aren't_
> angle brackets.
>
> When writing for general audience, it is probably better to use

well, I intend to be a little more technical, like discussing an
inscription for sci.lang .

> quotation marks (according to the rules of the language you are writing
> in) rather than any special notation: The letter "w" often represents a
> semivowel in English. (Replace the ASCII quotation marks by correct
> quotation marks whenever possible.)

.

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