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.
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)
But what for?
Could you tell in details?
endeveit: because it looks cool
a = 2;
b = 30;
Ñ = {qq: 3, zz: 4}
while (b ≥ a) {
a ×= c→qq;
}
↑b;
Hmmm… what about unicode keyboards?
- 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 …
@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.
Looks very unusual
Maybe it is power of habit or inertness of thinking
Perl 6:
http://dev.perl.org/perl6/faq.html:
user-definable operators (from the full Unicode set)
and http://dev.perl.org/perl6/doc/design/syn/S03.html#Hyper_Operators
I’ve got 10000 unicode symbol table here..
http://kurapov.name/unicode/
sounds like you are looking for Perl6
Here’s an implementation for PHP6… Have fun with it!
http://blog.libssh2.org/index.php?/archives/69-Fun-with-unicode.html
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!
[...] 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