esc + cc + esc gives a double-struck lower-case c. It is different, however, from the double-struck c given by esc + dsc + esc (the double stroke is curved in the former but vertical in the latter). Mathematica calls this character "\ConstantC". I can't find any information about its meaning or purpose. To add to the mystery, its Documentation Center page has a bullet point reading "Unicode: F7DA", but no such Unicode character exists.
2 Answers
The \[ConstantC]
character is used to format output expressions like C[1]
, such as those from DSolve. These outputs are actually wrapped in a TemplateBox however, so you can't use \[ConstantC]
manually for input, unless you copy-paste one such output.
In[1]:= C[1]
Out[1]= C[1] (*formats with \[ConstantC] in the front-end*)
In[2]:= \[ConstantC][1] === C[1]
Out[2]= False
To answer the second part of your question: U+F7DA is a perfectly valid Unicode character. However, it belongs to the so-called private use area, in which characters do not have a standard definition, but can be used by any application for its own purposes.
You can find this mentioned also in ToCharacterCode
:
The Wolfram System defines various additional characters in private Unicode space, with character codes between 57344 and 63743.
DSolve[y'[x] == y[x], y, x]
$\endgroup$C[1]
. The fact thatC[1]
is displayed as\[ConstantC]
is a different matter. $\endgroup$