Comment by toleavetheman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toleavetheman | Hacker News Reader

I think this library looks great. It seems to do just enough, and browser compatibility with a small filesize is wonderful.

I almost can't believe that all of the other (current) comments are complaining about the use of the λ character. Unicode is hardly a new concept, and it is certainly not "hostile" (hyperbole much?).

In fact, as modern languages like Julia become popular, I think we will see increased use of unicode characters in coding. Julia is very unicode friendly, which aids scientists and mathematicians when translating formulas to code. For example, it supports the "element of" operator ('∈') for testing if an item is in a set. These unicode characters actually _improve_ readability in many contexts, while being less convenient to type if you're only accustomed to ASCII.

I guess not super hostile, but I just don't know how to type it in emacs or vim except by memorising the code point :/

e.g. in Vim: Ctrl-V, U, 3bb <ret>

Which is OK for this one library... but if I had delta and epsilon libraries too I could see it getting to be a pain.

In terms of typing efficiency, 6 keystrokes, it's about the same as just typing "contra" except harder to remember.

For the quickest workaround if you need only a lambda char, bind something like this to some keys:

    (defun my-insert-lambda () 
        (interactive)
        (ucs-insert 955))

But there are many different options available in Emacs for inserting exotic characters, as listed here, for example: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10192341/how-to-enter-gre... - I didn't have any need for them, as I only need lambda character when I'm programming in Racket (which understands this character natively, which is very nice!), but both abbrevs and input method ways of doing this look legit.

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