3 ms·
> Why keep trying to cram an expressive syntax into the straitjacket of the 95 glyphs of ASCII when Unicode has been the new black for most of the past decade??
by tomxor 5y ago
> Why keep trying to cram an expressive syntax into the straitjacket of the 95 glyphs of ASCII when Unicode has been the new black for most of the past decade??
Because it must be possible to actually type syntax.
The problem is a physical one: keyboards are limited in space, we need alphabets, punctuation, a bunch of control keys, and finally we have a very small amount of space left to fit some arbitrary symbols - might as well be ASCII ones. The only way to truly break away from the ASCII table would be to start making giant non-standard keyboards... and now you have a huge inclusivity barrier, not to mention the impracticality of physically huge keyboards.
This all seems like a lot of effort and argument over something even more superficial than language syntax - they are only glyphs... how does using more and different glyphs substantially change anything?
- swiley 5y agoVim supports entering quite a lot of symbols that don't exist on most keyboards (like the integral symbol.) I always have to look up how and that forces people to use editors which support that. >And, yes, me too: I wrote this in vi(1), which is why the article does not have all the fancy Unicode glyphs in the first place. Maybe vi doesn't but as I said, I've used them in vim. Also, the title calls out terminals but I don't have any VTE software installed that doesn't have Unicode support.
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoEven if it's possible to type the syntax, there's also the speed of typing. How fast can I type "omega"? Pretty fast. How fast can I enter a unicode omega code point? Probably not as fast. How fast can I read "omega"? Pretty fast. How fast can I read an actual Greek letter omega? I don't read Greek, and my physics classes were decades ago. Yeah, I can figure out that it's an omega. It might take a bit, though...