> which itself is a result of limiting ourselves to the ASCII symbols that can be typed
I think we're ready for programming languages using some visually good Unicode characters, instead of overloading `[]{}!@#$%^&*()-_/` for everything!
I think we're ready for programming languages using some visually good Unicode characters, instead of overloading `[]{}!@#$%^&*()-_/` for everything!
A next step could be for common dev environments to actually convert symbol/key sequences to operators (how do APL programmers do it?)
Avoiding ambiguity and semantic overloading of ASCII symbols would surely help beginners (if also given a UI that clearly exposes ways to enter the new symbols). I always find one letter operators extremely strange too like u"word" s/foo/bar/ etc.
It seems a shame we can type in hundreds of Unicode symbols on a mobile virtual keyboard, but not readily on a physical keyboard.
JavaScript has supported Unicode for a long time, but the core language doesn't use it at all.
It's a neat hack, but that's the opposite of what I want. It means I can't look at source code and know what characters make it up, which is the primary reason I'm still putting up with plain text files (and mostly ASCII) for source code at all.
Out of habit, I occasionally type some control-letter combination which is a valid command in Emacs, but in Xcode (and other native Mac apps) inserts an invisible character, which happens to be invalid in Swift. 10 minutes later, I get a compilation error pointing at a line of code that looks perfectly valid. Frustrating!
option-= ≠
option-< ≤
option-> ≥
option-/ ÷
option-o ø
option-w ∑
How do you discover how to type ß, °, «, ‡ etc?
Android's gboard uses phonetics (long press [s] key for ß), symbolic similarity (long press [*] key for ‡) and visual similarity (long press [<] key for «) which is guessable for some symbols, but isn't discoverable for others (you can search for emoji by name, but not symbols).
That will replace the language flag icon in your top bar with an odd icon with the command key embedded.
The second option in that menu is the keyboard viewer. You can show that and drag on a corner to make it as large as you want. Dynamically changes the keyboard as you hold down modifier keys.
(On MacOS, putting a .layout file in ~/Library/Keyboard\ Layouts is enough.)
> option-w ∑
This would grate on me every single time I had to use it. It's an S. Put it on option-s.
Putting double S on option-s just makes option-w for Sigma more grating. If they were going by shape, it'd be on option-b, which is equally stupid. But since it's on S, we can conclude that... someone at Apple knows German, but nobody can even name a Greek letter? That Germans are right and Greeks are wrong? What?
Some already do: https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/base/math/#Base.:!=
if a ≠ b {
if a != b {
So far the response has been mixed.
Not everyone is open to this change.
[0] https://vlang.io
https://www.hanselman.com/blog/MonospacedProgrammingFontsWit...
They borrow syntax from LaTeX math-mode to allow symbol entry, such that you can type "\ne" and as soon as you hit the space after the "e", you get ≠ instead.
The language plugin for Visual Studio Code does the same thing.
Lean Prover's not exactly a programming language, but :
def foo (a b : ℕ) : ℕ → ℕ → ℕ :=
λ a b, a + b
I think it has to be all or nothing though, since if it's optional the odds of getting decent editor support for it is low.