Re: [office-formula] It's okay to use UNICODE name as a standardspreadsheet function

["Andreas J. Guelzow" <aguelzow@math.concordia.ab.ca>]

On Mon, 2007-05-03 at 10:50 -0500, David A. Wheeler wrote:
> We have discussed a function UNICODE, which takes a character and returns its Unicode/ISO 10646 numeric value.  E.G., UNICODE(" ") is 32, and UNICODE("π") {that's pi} is 960 (U+03C0).  This is the code point IGNORING any encoding (UTF-8, UTF-7, whatever).
> 
> I just got an email from the Unicode Consortium, below.  They say there is no problem naming a function "UNICODE".  Since Gnumeric already does this, I'm of a mind to continue the practice (and with a corresponding UNICHAR).  That means there's a corresponding UNICHAR.
> 
> The main alternative would be to name this function "ICODE" (for "International Code"), which would produce a corresponding "ICHAR".    An advantage of this would be to emphasize the international nature of this; really this only involves the standard character encoding agreed upon between ISO 10646 and the Unicode Consortium.  I'm fine with ICODE/ICHAR too; really, the main reason to use UNICODE/UNICHAR would be simply consistency with past practice.  Another is that many developers are familiar with Unicode (the term "international" can be a little ambiguous, since there are past multi-nation specifications like Latin-1 that aren't the same thing). Anyone who cares either way, please speak up. ASAP.
> 

I think UNICODE/UNICHAR is much more descriptive and should therefore be
used.  (And ICode/ICHAR reminds me more of iMac and iPhone than anything
international.)

Andreas
-- 
Andreas J. Guelzow, Professor
Dept. of Mathematical & Computing Sciences
Concordia University College of Alberta