Characters

[<masinter@arisia.xerox.com>]

I'm not clear what part of the text of the character proposal was
actually passed. Clearly "subscript" or "sub-script" is misleading
terminology.

The reason why character terminology is difficult is because the words
refer to things that people use in their every day life and outside of
LISP. I think the words "repertoire" and "script" are used to explain
the 'real world' foundations of actual use of characters in written
language and actual use of characters in ISO standards for the
interchange of information containing written language.

Here's my opinion:


When we want to talk about Common Lisp constructs, we can use Common
Lisp terminology, and leave the "repertoire" and "script" to our
explaination of how the Common Lisp terminology maps to the real world.

Thus, you should replace it with "STANDARD-CHAR is a subtype of
BASE-CHARACTER." As in,

"STANDARD-CHAR" is a type, that corresponds to a script.
STANDARD-CHAR is a subtype of BASE-CHARACTER. BASE-CHARACTER also
corresponds to a script, and the characters that correspond to
STANDARD-CHAR are a subset of those that correspond to BASE-CHARACTER.