4 ms·

Same, I’ve never cared for it. For these reasons I’ve decided to take a stand and avoid using the grave accent for anything in a programming language I’m workin

Same, I’ve never cared for it. For these reasons I’ve decided to take a stand and avoid using the grave accent for anything in a programming language I’m working on. Same goes for the dollar sign, because it’s somewhat Americentric, and as a currency character it doesn’t have any great semantic or mnemonic value except for, well, currency units. I guess you could argue for $trings (BASIC) or $calars (Perl) if you have $igils, but I don’t. Sacrificing these bits of ASCII is fine by me, because the language is small enough, and I also allow Unicode. For example, curved quotes are allowed and can be nested or contain ASCII quotes without escaping: // Character literals ‘'’ = '\'' // Text literals “Some "text" with “curved quotes”.” = "Some \"text\" with “curved quotes”." For the sake of usability, of course, everything in the core language & standard library has an ASCII spelling, like in Perl6. I’d like for other languages to adopt this view as well. If new languages allow proper Unicode notation in some sensible places, then programming editors’ input methods will catch up, e.g., automatically replacing “->” with “→” or “\theta” with “θ” (like Emacs’ TeX input mode). Also, does anyone know of a reference for keyboard layouts from around the world that includes estimates of the number of people using them? I’ve tried to keep things relatively easy to type on all the major layouts I know of, but I don’t want to alienate anyone if I can help it.

int_19h 9y ago
> Same goes for the dollar sign, because it’s somewhat Americentric, and as a currency character it doesn’t have any great semantic or mnemonic value except for, well, currency units. By that metric, wouldn't & be too Anglo-centric, and # be too Euro-centric? There are layouts out there on which neither is readily available.
- evincarofautumn 9y ago
  I suppose so. It’s just one of the many small judgement calls you make when designing a language, and definitely falls into the category of “design” more than engineering or science. At some point I decided that grave and dollar were out, while ampersand and octothorpe are in. And you can still define a dollar-sign operator if you want, it’s just not in the core language or standard library. English is the lingua franca of programming, so it’s hard to avoid some Anglicisms (like ampersand meaning “and”, dot instead of comma for decimals, and English-language keywords) without going against strong precedents set by other languages. If I really wanted to be pedantic, I might use /\ and \/ for logical “and” and “or”—those spellings are the major reason that the backslash even exists in ASCII.
- sjy 9y ago
  If anything, & is Latin rather than English :-)

int_19h 9y ago

> Same goes for the dollar sign, because it’s somewhat Americentric, and as a currency character it doesn’t have any great semantic or mnemonic value except for, well, currency units. By that metric, wouldn't & be too Anglo-centric, and # be too Euro-centric? There are layouts out there on which neither is readily available.

evincarofautumn 9y ago
I suppose so. It’s just one of the many small judgement calls you make when designing a language, and definitely falls into the category of “design” more than engineering or science. At some point I decided that grave and dollar were out, while ampersand and octothorpe are in. And you can still define a dollar-sign operator if you want, it’s just not in the core language or standard library. English is the lingua franca of programming, so it’s hard to avoid some Anglicisms (like ampersand meaning “and”, dot instead of comma for decimals, and English-language keywords) without going against strong precedents set by other languages. If I really wanted to be pedantic, I might use /\ and \/ for logical “and” and “or”—those spellings are the major reason that the backslash even exists in ASCII.
sjy 9y ago
If anything, & is Latin rather than English :-)