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Comment by Gibbon1 | Hacker News Reader

My snarky suggestion is we switch to emoji's for arithmetic operators. Semi serious incorporate syntax highlighting via markup into the language.

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I actually have a toy language that uses emojis for keywords, allows me to reduce tokenizing to basically "split by whitespace, split into runs of characters of the same class (every character is its own class except for [A-Za-z0-9_-] which make up a single class), then post-process tokens for finer distinctions". Strings are somewhat more painful, but using \q instead of \" to escape the double quotes helps.

I mean, not even a bad idea. I would honestly prefer operators to be more explicit like a-variableanother-varsomething-else. (EDIT: HN removed my emojis, but imagine a plus/minus emoji inbetween ids :( )

With a good font it would basically look similar to what a good IDE with syntax highlighting already does (different color for operators).

I think this would be a bad idea because emoji are hard to type.

This might be a bit old school but I prefer things limited to plain ASCII. There's only so many keys on a keyboard and want to be able to touch type everything without thinking or looking at a special emoji bar.

That I absolutely agree with, but I think it is about time we let go of “programs as plain text” axiom. With good tooling/IDE — which are already sort of visual editors only converting to and from to plain text on save — you could enter a ‘+’ and get autocomplete show the “emoji +” as an option for example. Because the actually important question to ask here in my opinion is “what is the easiest way to read/comprehend programs”, and we seem to have implicitly agreed that syntax highlighting is already a must (which works on even not yet valid program text!). Slightly more reliance on tooling doesn’t seem too bad to me.

With a proper keyboard layout, you can type a lot of unicode: https://michaelgoerz.net/notes/the-us-international-scientif...

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