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Comment by jrabone | Hacker News Reader

Given the JVM supports Unicode identifiers, and given the rich vein of mathematical operators therein, I always thought it would be fun to do the APL thing with Java. Scala went a (very) little way towards this, but I don't think anyone has taken it to logical extremes yet.

(although I did once threaten my co-workers that I would tell the theoretical mathematician on the team about Unicode identifiers in Java. He used to write LaTeX in the Javadoc comments [which Doxygen handles rather nicely])

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This would be even more fun if Java supported user-defined infix operators with adjustable precedence, like Haskell.

Or even mix-fix operators like Maude. Maude lets you define operators with variable arity and arbitrary stuff before, between and after, like

       let _ = _ in _ 
       _::_(_)
       _,_ |- _
       You _, but I _

Always considered this a cool feature.

I believe Fortress used Unicode identifiers quite extensively.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_(programming_language)

I believe you misremember. From what I recall fortress had an ascii syntax where special combinations would be translated into symbols by the doc/rendering system, eg NN would be rendered as (bold N used for natural numbers).

"tell the theoretical mathematician on the team about Unicode identifiers in Java"

...thus reducing his productivity to zero while he hunts through the Unicode maps to find the glyph he wants?

Emacs has the TeX input mode which lets you type special characters using their TeX names. So you can type \alpha for α, \to for → and so on. And if you don't like that for whatever reason, there are other alternative input modes you can use.

If you're using a tool which forces you to use a map to find glyphs, you're simply doing it wrong. Really, there is no excuse in this day and age not to support Unicode well!

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