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I think it's crazy that we limit programming languages to using ASCII in 2022. Yes, I understand the chicken-and-egg issues of input, but it still seems like we
by rootbear 4y ago
I think it's crazy that we limit programming languages to using ASCII in 2022. Yes, I understand the chicken-and-egg issues of input, but it still seems like we're limiting ourselves as developers if we don't make use of a richer symbology. I know Raku supports some Unicode operators and Guy Steele's Fortress language also supported non-ASCII symbols so it is possible. But I'm not holding my breath. This is just one old man's crazy opinion.
- valenterry 4y agoWe do. Look at Scala. Almost no limitations here.
- throwaway17_17 4y agoAFAIK Fortress did not actually support non-ASCII symbols in the code. What the Fortress team did is have a display layer that was fed a list of symbols using ‘\BigSum’ style ASCII and then merely displayed a selected Unicode symbol in the editor.
- rootbear 4y agoAh, thanks. It's been a while since I looked at the Fortress papers.
- roywiggins 4y agoJulia supports most unicode characters for function and variable names (and operators), so you can write, eg, "∑(x,µ) = x ⊗ µ" and it won't complain.
- brazzy 4y agoJavaScript, Java and C# all allow Unicode characters as identifiers.