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I was excited to see that in Julia you can type many mathematical symbols and Greek letters and such. What is more, I saw that you can type subscript and superscript letters via \_x and \^x. Interestingly, you can type some superscript capital letters, like \^L, but you cannot type the corresponding subscript letter (\_L). Why is this the case?
More importantly though, I was scrolling through the huge list of unicode characters one can type in Julia, and found you can type all sorts of questionably useful stuff like poodles and bathtubs. Why can you type all these weird things, but you cannot type something like a capitalized subscript (which seems far more useful in the context of Julia)?
Who makes these decisions anyways? Is Julia just completely following a pre-determined standard, or are they making decisions themselves? (I would have thought it was a standard, but I did not think that, for instance, superscripted letters were part of the normal list of unicode characters.)
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The intended use when these characters were added to Unicode was to allow chemical and algebra formulas and phonetics to be written without markup, but produce true superscripts and subscripts. Thus "H₂O" (using a subscript character) is supposed to be identical to "H 2 O" (with subscript markup).
The subscript letters is a text symbol that can easily copy and paste into any social media, website, and emails. The following table shows the name and meaning of the subscript letters along with the HTML code (hexadecimal and decimal) and Unicode. To copy these codes, click on code.
The two tables below show these characters. Each superscript or subscript character is preceded by a normal x to show the subscripting/superscripting. The table on the left contains the actual Unicode characters; the one on the right contains the equivalents using HTML markup for the subscript or superscript.
Other characters from Latin-1 not related to super- or sub-scripts. Unicode version 13.0 also includes subscript and superscript characters that are intended for semantic usage, in the following blocks: The Latin-1 Supplement block contains the feminine and masculine ordinal indicators ª and º.
The subscript L isn't available because it's not part of the Unicode standard for subscripts/superscripts. It's not arbitrariness on the part of Julia, it's Unicode :)
In particular, see this table from the above Wikipedia page which shows the superscript L ("Superscript small cap ") but no subscript L:
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