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Comment by andrepd | Hacker News Reader

For a while there I was confused on whether this was an April fools prank or not. Which certainly does justice to Perl.

I thought it was strange to be able to use greek characters and the like in the code, and then I arrived at the slide about Custom Terms and Operators[0] and... now I think it's an April fool.

[0] http://tpm2016.zoffix.com/#/12

Julia lets you use Unicode in your code as well, and it's great. I use Julia for math a lot and it's really nice to go straight from your equations to code with variables named α and ϵ instead of alpha and epsilon. The vim and emacs modes also make it make it easy to enter characters like this.

http://iaindunning.com/blog/julia-unicode.html (note: 2 years old)

>I thought it was strange to be able to use greek characters and the like in the code

We have been doing that for AGES. Not just in languages like APL, but even in Javascript, Go and tons more...

https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Unicode_variable_names

Yes, Unicode variables are a thing, but I am afraid it makes the language less approachable if it requires a special keyboard or at least some tweaks in the IDE to input those characters - and I say that as someone who added some macros in emacs to enter French accentuated characters with an American keyboard. I think it's one of the reason APL isn't much used these days...

Perl 6 does not require use of Unicode characters in code and does not require a special keyboard.

It does require some mechanism to input Unicode if that's what you want to do but that wil be true for any language -- it's nothing to do with Perl 6.

That's not a joke at all, you really can define those as custom operators if you want to.

If you watch the actual presentation, that slide was there to make people chuckle. It worked: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paa3niF72Nw

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