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Re: Unit Scaling Prefixes: (was Birthday Wish)



Phil Parker wrote:
Date: Mon, 12 Apr 1999 09:00:14 -0500
From: paul o johnson <pojhome@FLASH.NET>

Why doesn't someone invent a scientific keyboard having separate keys for the
more common Greek letters?

Because it wouldn't help; how Greek letters are represented internally varies
from one application to another -- there's no standard. If there were, such
a keyboard would be quite helpful.

This may be dangerous, but I can't seem to resist pointing out....

There is a standard, used by a large number of personal computers (what
is it, 5%? 10%?) It's the Apple extended (8-bit) ASCII set, and it's
been around for many years. It doesn't have everything you could
possibly want, but it has a lot of useful characters. And both the
internal representation and the typed key-sequences to access them are
uniform across all applications.

<Tongue in cheek mode on>
It's only those hobbled with WinDOS and UNIX systems that have a problem
on their hands.
<Tongue in cheek mode off>

--
--James McLean
jmclean@chem.ucsd.edu
post doc, UC San Diego, Chemistry
moving to SUNY Geneseo Physics this fall