van Vliet use of backquote (and backslash)

[Jose E. Marchesi]

> Good evening all
>
> I noticed tonight while poring through van Vliet's transput code that he
> appropriates the backquote as "plus_i_times", as part of his defining sets
> of characters to be used in transput formatting conversion:
>
> CharBag {ℵ₀} radix10digit = STRINGTOBAG "0123456789",
>         {ℵ₀} radix_2digit = STRINGTOBAG "01",
>         {ℵ₀} radix_4digit = STRINGTOBAG "0123",
>         {ℵ₀} radix_8digit = STRINGTOBAG "01234567",
>         {ℵ₀} radix16digit = STRINGTOBAG "0123456789abcedf",
>         {ℵ₀} time_ten_to_the_power = STRINGTOBAG "\eE",
>         {ℵ₀} flipflop               = STRINGTOBAG (flip + flop),
>         {ℵ₀} plus_i_times           = STRINGTOBAG "`iI",
>         {ℵ₀} signspace              = STRINGTOBAG "+- ",
>         {ℵ₀} plusminus              = STRINGTOBAG "+-",
>         {ℵ₀} point                  = STRINGTOBAG string("."),
>         {ℵ₀} xylpkq                 = STRINGTOBAG "xylpkq";
>
> His CharBag type above is like a Java HashSet<Character> and the
> STRINGTOBAG operator converts a string to a CharBag instance.
>
> This is the only place it appears in the code but of course the name
> plus_i_times appears in a few places...
>
> I'm thinking that, given the earlier discussion about whether or not
> backquote could be usurped for some other use, maybe better to nip this one
> in the bud...

At the end we are following Hansen's recommendation and using apostrophe
for the brief form of OF.

If/when we support left to right selection, it will most certainly be
using the dot character, not the backquote.

So the backquote is free... do we want to use it for plus_i_times?
Thats the question :)

>
> The eagle-eyed reader who has yet to fall asleep reading this will also
> note that van Vliet has proposed using the backslash as an alternative for
> time_ten_to_the_power... which maybe also should be discouraged.

I have wondered about that one as well.  At the moment backslash is also
free, but do we want to spend it on this?

What are common representation for plus_i_times and
time_ten_to_the_power?  I mean generally.