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> It is often best to avoid non-ASCII characters in source code. Scientists writing Julia are laughing on the floor.

• kps 5y ago
  Sometimes I wish COBOL style hadn't won over mathematical style as the convention for every general purpose language except possibly Go.
  • marcosdumay 5y ago
    There are many languages pushing for mathematical style formulas, but until they get easy to type, I don't think any of them will succeed. It's not COBOL that won. It's qwerty.
    • eigenspace 5y ago
      Julia makes typing unicode characters very easy; so easy that I keep a Julia repl open a lot of the time just for typing various mathematical symbols easily. For example, to type α², you just type \alpha, hit the tab button to turn it into α, and then type \^2 and hit tab again to turn that into ². If someone gives you a unicode character that you don't know how to type, you just hit the ? button to enter the repl-help mode and then paste the character in. help?> α² "α²" can be typed by \alpha<tab>\^2<tab> search: Couldn't find α² No documentation found. Binding α² does not exist.
      • snicker7 5y ago
        The amazing thing about this UI is that it just works across many of different editors and REPLs (VSCode, Emacs, Pluto, &etc). It reminds me of GNU TeXMacs, which has a similar interface for equations. That is, typing "\int" followed by tab will render an integral sign.