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Re: Inverted (=reflected) N

i said:
    chris:
        No they do not; they are just synonyms for glyphs.

ulrik corrects me:
    Sorry, but you misattributed this quotation.  It wasn't me who proposed.
    I guess it was Berthold but never mind.

sorry for the misattribution, ulrik.  (i seem to be doing that today.)

ulrik:
    To comment on the subject, I believe it would be preferable to describe
    glyph names by form rather than function (i.e. Omega, Delta, Sigma, Pi),
    while refering to  function in a document markup.

    [...]

    ... The only potential use I could see would be to define
    a \smallsum or \smallprod operator using the glyphs \Sigma and \Pi.

that would still be an error.  (i would assume that \smallsum is a
symbol, like \smallint, that is intended for use in a superscript.
i don't like \smallint; it's one of the kludges in tex where a
different design would have resulted in a much more logical input
syntax, allowing \int to be used everywhere to mean the integration
of the following expression.)

i have seen, in a manuscript submitted to and published by ams,
    \sum \Sigma ...
these are two different things -- one is an operator, the other is
a variable.  it's also possible to reverse them:
    \Sigma \sum ...
it's a historical convention that a large Sigma is used to indicate
summation.  and by now, the summation operator has a rather different
shape in print.  i don't know how, except by referring to textual
context outside the math expression, it might be possible to
distinguish between these two examples if the names were the same;
i surely couldn't do it, and i think it would be pretty tricky for
a computer program to do it too.  and *that* is why we must be
careful about naming.
						-- bb