Do I have to use emojis when introducing the entities? Are they used for anything?
It would be nice if the point of the emoji was explained anywhere in the docs but I couldn't find it anywhere
The use of emojis looks quite similar to the way parameter/argument labels are introduced in Swift: in the function signature, you use two names (separated by a space) before the colon, instead of one. So, is this second part a shorthand alternative name, or just a visual comment, or?..
ENTITY_DECLARATION ::= NAME [SPACE COMMENT] COLON ...
ENTITY_DECLARATION ::= NAME [SPACE SINGLE_EMOJI_COMMENT] COLON ...
ENTITY_DECLARATION ::= NAME1 [SPACE NAME2] COLON ...
ENTITY_DECLARATION ::= REGULAR_NAME [SPACE EMOJI_NAME] COLON ...
Don't get me wrong, I am not opposed to emojis on principle, they are just 1) a tad too outstanding in the text for my taste, 2) a tad too difficult to enter unless you're on a mobile keyboard, 3) I personally would rather not edit program source code/configs on mobile.
Bwahahaha. Sorry, I’ve just imagined the poor sod who has to implement this grammar and has to decide whether presentation selectors or (potentially unknown) ZWJ sequences or (potentially unknown) letter-pairs denoting flags count parts of as single emoji (in theory they do[1], but good luck figuring out what tables you need).
> the way parameter/argument labels are introduced in Swift: in the function signature, you use two names (separated by a space) before the colon, instead of one
Side note: Swift’s style likely comes from Objective-C, which in turn comes from Smalltalk.
Windows and macOS both have great on-screen keyboards (OSK)/input method editor (IME) for emoji. Many (most?) Linux desktop environments also provide one. On Windows it is Win+. or Win+; and on macOS it is Ctrl+Cmd+Space and on Gnome it is Ctrl+Shift+E,Space or Super+E.