# Unicode: a bad idea, in general

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/unicode-a-bad-idea-in-general/99897>\
**Category:** General Usage\
**Created:** [June 5, 2023, 3:25pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/unicode-a-bad-idea-in-general/99897 "2023-06-05T15:25:07Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 38

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**Author:** ![Eben60](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/eben60/32/13475_2.png) [@Eben60](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Eben60)\
**Post date:** [June 6, 2023, 6:09pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/unicode-a-bad-idea-in-general/99897/38 "2023-06-06T18:09:54Z")

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Unicode: a great idea, if used prudently!

Just finished implementing some small package

1. The calculations therein are based mostly on one paper. It was immensely helpful for me to be able to use the same notation as in the paper, with all these `α`, `β`, `ϕ`, `Rₛ`, `Rₚ` etc. I was even able to copy some formulas from the paper’s pdf into the code and just edit it slightly.
2. In physics, `μ₀` is unambiguous, at least in the context of electromagnetism, and formulas using it are better readable IMO.
3. One of the [problems](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/problem-with-elliptic-integrals/99922) which cost me half ~~a day~~ a night of debugging was that elliptic integrals in `SpecialFunctions` are defined using `m` as argument, not `k`, with `k²=m`. I haven’t RTFM, only checked quickly the function help, and didn’t pay attention to having `m` here and `k` in Wikipedia. Had the function help used `k²` , which is just as valid identifier, instead of `m`, it could save me a lot of time.

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