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Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2004 17:51:57 +0200
From: David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>
To: PML <phylocode@ouvaxa.cats.ohiou.edu>
Subject: Re: Yet one more proposal for a shorthand notation, and for an addition to Rec. 11A
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Taylor" <mike@indexdata.com>
Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 2004 5:07 PM
> > I don't know if it's desirable, at least in this case, that it be
> > language-free. The PhyloCode may come to cover several types of
> > taxa, not just clades. The currently proposed format is
> > appropriately simlar to a mathermatical or computer-language
> > function, and you could use it for other types of taxa as well,
> > e.g. species(CM 9380).
This wouldn't be a definition, except if we could agree on one species
concept (yes, thank you, I'm a magnificent comedian, I know).
> What I've seen in various papers is that
> the word just gets quietly dropped, and the definition is written as
> (A+B). Which I am also not wild about.
Were it written {A + B}, it would be clear that it's a definition rather
than just a description.
> > I have never heard of anyone using "#" for "not" -- I can't see how this
would
> > be intuitive at all.
>
> No, it seems bizarre to me. If we want symbols to use for negation,
> then "¬", "~", "-" and "!" all seem like stronger candidates to me.
"~" means around, about, and the like -- it would be totally confusing. "-"
could be interpreted as minus, potentially leading to confusion with "\". I
can't think for a reason for "!". "#" has some similarity with the unequal
sign... = with / through it... ≠ in Unicode (UTF-8).
How widely available is "¬" on keyboards? It's ASCII, but e. g. not present
on my keyboard (German -- QWERTZUIOPÜ).
> > I thought that "<--", whether ugly or not, clearly communicated what
> > it meant.
I find the direction of the arrow counterintuitive... and the other way
around other people would be confused.
> All things being equal, I think it would be pragmatically desirable to
> limit clade definition notation to common US-ASCII characters, which
> are very widely (universally?) supported.
Yes, universally on computers.
> "Omit needless words" -- Strunk & White.
:-)