Unicode vs. Programming Languages

I really-really want to see a programming language, which allows using proper unicode symbols for operators.

I mean:

  • × instead of *
  • → instead of ->
  • ← instead if <-
  • ≠ instrad of !=
  • ≤ and ≥ instead of <= and >=

This list can be continued more and more…

I perfectly understand the roots of current situation and I don’t ask to use ONLY unicode-symbols, but I ask language-manufacturers to allow this.

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View CommentsUnicode vs. Programming Languages

  • Tobias Struckmeier

    Hehe and an IDE that automatically makes the replacement after you type the ascii combinations.
    Because I don’t want to enter the unicode when writing one of those :)

  • Tobias: that’s an easy part, as there are a lot of utilities which do such changes in any application (I know at least 2 such tools for mac and 1 such tool for windows)

  • endeveit

    But what for?
    Could you tell in details?

  • endeveit: because it looks cool ;)

    a = 2;
    b = 30;
    с = {qq: 3, zz: 4}

    while (b ≥ a) {
    a ×= c→qq;
    }

    ↑b;

  • Hmmm… what about unicode keyboards?

  • hartmut

    - typing unicode -> no way

    - auto replacement -> i’d rather have “what you type is what you get”

    - pretty printing -> tools like a2ps have been supporting this for ages

    - and then there’s the situation every once in a while where you have to modify code on a deployment system on which $EDITOR is not unicode aware yet …

  • Jan

    @Regin Too many keys :p

  • hartmut:
    - typing unicode can be not-so-painful if OS gives a helping hand
    - auto replacement is a personal choice

    anyway, I think I made it clear, that both of these options (good’ol ascii and pretty unicode) should be supported by compilers/interpreters, imho.

    and non-unicode-aware editor is something I don’t want to face (actually I am quite happy, that these days I can use unicode on mac, linux, freebsd, openbsd and solaris)

    and pretty-printing is a source of confusion… because whenever you read pretty-printed document and try to type it in, you get problems…

  • Here you already see the problems, Unicode introduces: The replacement you want for “->” (an Arrow) renders as “>” on my computer that doesn’t have a very exotic configuration: WinXP + Firefox (German version both)

  • Sebastian: that just means, that your font doesn’t support that symbol… :)

    Unfortunately, a lot of windows-fonts have poor unicode-support.

  • endeveit

    Looks very unusual :)
    Maybe it is power of habit or inertness of thinking :D

  • I’ve got 10000 unicode symbol table here..
    http://kurapov.name/unicode/

  • sounds like you are looking for Perl6 :)

  • Dominik del Bondio: user-definable operators are possible in Haskell (and I guess some other languages) too…

    I want to see that as a “native feature” (aliased to standard ascii-operators)

  • Finally, a use for all the keys on the space cadet keyboard! :D

  • [...] Sara Golemon, being interested in Unicode as she is, decided to investigate further when she saw a recent post about issues with Unicode math symbols: Being a whimsical sort, I decided that actually implementing his request would be more fun than simply pish-poshing it. I’m not suggesting this be part of PHP6 (I still don’t personally think it’s a good idea), but it’s a fun exercise and good for a conversation starter… [...]

  • I would love this to happen.
    If I can input these things easily..
    Like every time I want a square root sign I have to go to online and search “square root UTF” to find it.

  • Mgcci: such input is easily achieved using macro-expanders… such as TextExpander (on mac)

    I am sure there are similiar tools for other platforms

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