4 ms·

Keep in my that in Unicode there are several symbols that look alike. It is not just the character set that matters, but how many of such things we have. May b

by harikb 5y ago

Keep in my that in Unicode there are several symbols that look alike. It is not just the character set that matters, but how many of such things we have. May be instead of arguing for Unicode, community needs to come up with a unambiguous smaller set of symbols languages should support.

taeric 5y ago
I dread the day when I edit some code that has both \Sigma and \sum in the same scope.
- creata 5y ago
  You mean ∑ and Σ? Yeah, that'd be terrible. It doesn't seem like it should be Unicode's job to assign meaning to characters, so I don't know why ∑ ("U+2211 N-Ary Summation") exists.
  - taeric 5y ago
    Yeah. I was offering up an example.
  - a1369209993 5y ago
    > I don't know why [it] exists. Ill-considered backward 'compatibility' with block-drawing character sets for mathematical typesetting. (Fucked if I know which character set, but presumably the same one they found U+23B2 '⎲' and U+23B3 '⎳' in.)
    - taeric 5y ago
      Pretty sure those are necessary with the extenders when you want to sum larger things like integrals. Can't remember the details, though.
robocat 5y ago
And ASCII has the reverse problem: one symbol gets extremely overloaded semantically (syntax wars?!). Tell me what does ":" mean? Now if I tell you the language is Typescript, what does "?" mean? I personally believe semantic overloading causes a lot of problems, but we are so steeped in the existing limitations that we don't recognise it is a problem.
- taeric 5y ago
  Odd choice. Punctuation, by itself, is virtually meaningless. Language overloads things. Pretty much period. I doubt programming will get away from that.
  - robocat 5y ago
    The implied topic of my comment was programming languages, where your punctuation characters really do matter. So much so in some languages that a single misplaced " " can really ruin your day. We are so short of semantic operators that languages start to use single letters like "s", "q", " u" as operators or modifiers - which I find ugly (although the best compromise). I have experienced how the wrong Unicode character can ruin my day - but that is what tooling and editors and best practice are there to help with. Keyboards are the main problem now I think (in the past it was your OS, your editor, and your tooling). I regularly type Unicode characters from my handheld devices, but hardly ever from my qwerty entry devices (I can't easily find ¡, ∆, ↑ or ç as examples).
    - taeric 5y ago
      Taken at minimal value, punctuation is merely another symbol. A variable named by the symbol "index" will have context dependent meaning. So...I don't see how this changes my point. The list of symbols that is a program will have many of those symbols in need of context to understand. Do you really think programming can escape that? Edit: I am sympathetic. I like lisp for having fewer signifiers than other languages.

by harikb 5y ago

taeric 5y ago

I dread the day when I edit some code that has both \Sigma and \sum in the same scope.

creata 5y ago
You mean ∑ and Σ? Yeah, that'd be terrible. It doesn't seem like it should be Unicode's job to assign meaning to characters, so I don't know why ∑ ("U+2211 N-Ary Summation") exists.
- taeric 5y ago
  Yeah. I was offering up an example.
- a1369209993 5y ago
  > I don't know why [it] exists. Ill-considered backward 'compatibility' with block-drawing character sets for mathematical typesetting. (Fucked if I know which character set, but presumably the same one they found U+23B2 '⎲' and U+23B3 '⎳' in.)
  - taeric 5y ago
    Pretty sure those are necessary with the extenders when you want to sum larger things like integrals. Can't remember the details, though.

robocat 5y ago

And ASCII has the reverse problem: one symbol gets extremely overloaded semantically (syntax wars?!). Tell me what does ":" mean? Now if I tell you the language is Typescript, what does "?" mean? I personally believe semantic overloading causes a lot of problems, but we are so steeped in the existing limitations that we don't recognise it is a problem.

taeric 5y ago
Odd choice. Punctuation, by itself, is virtually meaningless. Language overloads things. Pretty much period. I doubt programming will get away from that.
- robocat 5y ago
  The implied topic of my comment was programming languages, where your punctuation characters really do matter. So much so in some languages that a single misplaced " " can really ruin your day. We are so short of semantic operators that languages start to use single letters like "s", "q", " u" as operators or modifiers - which I find ugly (although the best compromise). I have experienced how the wrong Unicode character can ruin my day - but that is what tooling and editors and best practice are there to help with. Keyboards are the main problem now I think (in the past it was your OS, your editor, and your tooling). I regularly type Unicode characters from my handheld devices, but hardly ever from my qwerty entry devices (I can't easily find ¡, ∆, ↑ or ç as examples).
  - taeric 5y ago
    Taken at minimal value, punctuation is merely another symbol. A variable named by the symbol "index" will have context dependent meaning. So...I don't see how this changes my point. The list of symbols that is a program will have many of those symbols in need of context to understand. Do you really think programming can escape that? Edit: I am sympathetic. I like lisp for having fewer signifiers than other languages.