3 ms·

Possibly a better way to achieve a similar level of prettiness would be (ab)use of vim's conceal feature. Through its judicious use, the author can have "forall

Possibly a better way to achieve a similar level of prettiness would be (ab)use of vim's conceal feature. Through its judicious use, the author can have "forall" appear to them as ∀, "alpha" as α, etc., without imposing these symbols on their colleagues.

gleenn 3y ago
Agree, there is definitely a trade-off, I certainly don't know how to input those characters quickly even if the author states it is faster in Vim and I am not a Vim newbie. Also, if you get a stacktrace in a log file, do they still print nicely? Do they still print nicely if I'm viewing that stacktrace on a build server's web interface? There are probably some number of utilities that this code is "viewed" by that don't correctly handle non-ascii unicode and the usability would suffer at the expense of the beauty/terseness. They do look pretty though.
- WJW 3y ago
  Well the article mentions Ctrl-k+FA to put in the ∀ symbol, but it should be fairly easy to make it output "forall" instead and then use the concealing feature to turn it into ∀. That would get you the best of both worlds, no?
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  Honestly, I would have had this concern ~10 years ago, but it's 2023. Unicode is ubiquitous, to the point that you'd need to pretty aggressively go out of your way to find things breaking due to it.
  - cryptonector 3y ago
    Roboto Mono doesn't support all the math glyphs, even some of the ones TFA uses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36438765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36438765
  - jcparkyn 3y ago
    It's still much more annoying than it should be to input Unicode characters in most operating systems and text editors, though.
    - bPspGiJT8Y 3y ago
      I agree, in Kitty I'd have to hit C-S-u and then type fora... to get ∀. Good thing I can just type forall and the formatter replaces the keyword with the symbol for me :) Same for transforming othey symbols, like :: and =>, <=, ->, <- into single characters.

gleenn 3y ago

Agree, there is definitely a trade-off, I certainly don't know how to input those characters quickly even if the author states it is faster in Vim and I am not a Vim newbie. Also, if you get a stacktrace in a log file, do they still print nicely? Do they still print nicely if I'm viewing that stacktrace on a build server's web interface? There are probably some number of utilities that this code is "viewed" by that don't correctly handle non-ascii unicode and the usability would suffer at the expense of the beauty/terseness. They do look pretty though.

WJW 3y ago
Well the article mentions Ctrl-k+FA to put in the ∀ symbol, but it should be fairly easy to make it output "forall" instead and then use the concealing feature to turn it into ∀. That would get you the best of both worlds, no?
OkayPhysicist 3y ago
Honestly, I would have had this concern ~10 years ago, but it's 2023. Unicode is ubiquitous, to the point that you'd need to pretty aggressively go out of your way to find things breaking due to it.
- cryptonector 3y ago
  Roboto Mono doesn't support all the math glyphs, even some of the ones TFA uses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36438765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36438765
- jcparkyn 3y ago
  It's still much more annoying than it should be to input Unicode characters in most operating systems and text editors, though.
  - bPspGiJT8Y 3y ago
    I agree, in Kitty I'd have to hit C-S-u and then type fora... to get ∀. Good thing I can just type forall and the formatter replaces the keyword with the symbol for me :) Same for transforming othey symbols, like :: and =>, <=, ->, <- into single characters.