Re: Unit Scaling Prefixes: (was Birthday Wish)

["J. Douglas Patterson" <dpatter@DV037S33.LAWRENCE.KS.US>]

On Thu, 15 Apr 1999, paul o johnson wrote:

> Now wait a minute, Phil. All applications by all developers interpret the A key as
> the Roman letter A in English fonts and as the Greek letter alpha in Symbol font,
> do they not? I routinely use only three word processing applications, but this is
> true in all three of them: Microsoft Word, Microsoft Powerpoint, and Adobe
> Pagemaker. When I want a sigma, I type S, select it and change it to Symbol font,
> and I get a sigma. To my knowledge, all applications use the same relationship
> between English and Greek letters.
>
> But even if they didn't, all applications would necessarily interpret a separate
> alpha key as alpha, etc.
>
> What am I missing?
When you type hte <A> key on your keyboard, your computer interprets that
not as the letter <a> or <A> but as binary number between 1 and 127.
There is a software key that then interprets this as a character.  This
software key is the ASCII Character Code.  A piece of software such as a
font module will draw a picture on screen that it associates with that
ASCII code.  All of the 26 letters (upper and lower case), all of the
numbers, all of the punctuation marks, and some control-<key> characters
are assigned a specific ASCII code number which is standard across the
industry.  The greek letters such as mu or sigma do not have a specific
ASCII code value.  The font module "Symobol" draws the ASCII character, a,
to look like an alpha.  That is the difference.


        J. Douglas Patterson
        Adjunct Inst of Physics & Physical Science
        Office:  SCI 105C
        Phone:  (913)469-4444 Ext. 5947
        http://www.jccc.net/~dpatter

        "When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second.
         When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour.
         That's relativity."     - Albert Einstein -