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Date: Sat, 30 Nov 2013 02:05:59 -0300
From: Zero Piraeus <z@etiol.net>
To: python-list@python.org
Subject: Re: Python Unicode handling wins again -- mostly
References: <529934dc$0$29993$c3e8da3$5496439d@news.astraweb.com> <roy-89763C.21084929112013@news.panix.com> <529967dc$0$29993$c3e8da3$5496439d@news.astraweb.com>
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On Sat, Nov 30, 2013 at 04:21:49AM +0000, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Fri, 29 Nov 2013 21:08:49 -0500, Roy Smith wrote:
> > The whole idea of ligatures like fi is purely typographic.
> 
> In English, that's correct. I'm not sure if we can generalise that to
> all languages that have ligatures. It also partly depends on how you
> define ligatures. For example, would you consider that ampersand & to
> be a ligature? These days, I would consider & to be a distinct
> character, but originally it began as a ligature for "et" (Latin for
> "and").
> 
> But let's skip such corner cases, as they provide much heat but no 
> illumination, [...]

In the interest of warmth (I know it's winter in some parts of the
world) ...

As I understand it, "&" has always been used to replace the word "et"
specifically, rather than the letter-pair e,t (no-one has ever written
"k&tle" other than ironically), which makes it a logogram rather than a
ligature (like "@").

(I happen to think the presence of ligatures in Unicode is insane, but
my dictator-of-the-world certificate appears to have gotten lost in the
post, so fixing that will have to wait).

 -[]z.

-- 
Zero Piraeus: inter caetera
http://etiol.net/pubkey.asc