Is there a glyph (so not the word 'symbol' or equivalent) whose established meaning is 'symbol'? annoyingly self-referential as it is, I do occasionally find cases where it would be useful - for instance, where one might otherwise say "consider a symbol S", but the values S might take could be Latin characters. For the avoidance of confusion, it would be nice to have a general symbol to use instead of 'S'.
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According to Google's Bard, there isn't so much of a cross-disciplinary example, although it says that Ⓢ is often used for such a purpose in mathematics.– Kristian BerryCommented May 30, 2023 at 15:15
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@KristianBerry - really?– Mauro ALLEGRANZACommented May 30, 2023 at 15:23
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@MauroALLEGRANZA IDK for sure, I tried going through the "Special Characters" function in my word processor, and didn't turn up any examples. A search-engine attempt didn't give any relevant answers either. Bard said the one thing but I've gotten wildly inaccurate answers from it before.– Kristian BerryCommented May 30, 2023 at 15:40
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I would say, on a more conclusive side of things, that there isn't a common symbol with the OP's intended use. But so I also don't see why the OP thinks stipulation isn't enough to prevent confusion. E.g. if the target is the Latin alphabet, we could just say, "Let us consider the Latin alphabet," and have done with it.– Kristian BerryCommented May 30, 2023 at 15:42
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2 Answers
In philosophical logic, we often use the square half-brackets to denote “the code of” - 「S」 is often something like “the Gödel numbering of formula S. (It’s usually upper square brackets on both sides - I’m just struggling with formatting!)
Typically, this is Gödel numbering just acting as our standard theory of syntax, so perhaps that’s a suitably canonical form for your own purposes?
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In programming language semantics it's the double bracket — ⟦
prog text⟧– RushiCommented Aug 20, 2023 at 7:26
There is, in software design, the notion of a wildcard character, which:
... is a kind of placeholder represented by a single character, such as an asterisk (*), which can be interpreted as a number of literal characters or an empty string. It is often used in file searches so the full name need not be typed.
The Wikipedia entry on question marks mentions that "?" is sometimes such a wildcard symbol in e.g. a computer/programming context. Depending on what "established" means per the OP, then, it could be said that in computer science, there are relatively pervasive symbols-for-"symbol" in the intended sense of those terms. So I would think that in texts about type theory (and given the computation-typology correspondence), there are probably some useful conventions drawn up at least per text; if this or that author is engaging with an audience for the purpose of reapplications of the notation in their text(s), then however large and agreeable their audience happens to be will determine to an extent whether we call those conventions "established."
answered Aug 19, 2023 at 19:14