4 ms·

> Even allowing comparison operators like ≤, <, ≠ and = that align > consistently would be a useful start. Every text editor that understands Unicode already a

> Even allowing comparison operators like ≤, <, ≠ and = that align > consistently would be a useful start. Every text editor that understands Unicode already allows for that. If you want to use ≤ rather than <=, then you need to alter the language, not the editor.

swiftcoder 2y ago
You don't need to modify the language, and most popular editors already support this. You'll need to enable ligature support, and install a font that contains the appropriate ligatures (as many coding-specific fonts already do)
- auggierose 2y ago
  That's not really a solution, is it, for example I don't want <= to be confused with ≤ within a string. What you propose is just one more half-baked solution that the industry is full of.
  - rollcat 2y ago
    That's why you need editor support for this; the lexer understands the difference between an operator and a string literal (that's how syntax highlighting works), and should be able to use ligatures in one context but not the other. (BTW I'm not a fan of coding ligatures myself, but they seem to be popular.)
    - auggierose 2y ago
      Yes, if you do it on top of the lexer it starts to make sense to me. I still think the language should also support the corresponding "ligatures", so that no confusion can result if you happen to enter ≤ directly, but this is actually a nice solution to the problem of what to do in your language aware editor when the user enters <= : nothing! You just assign to different token classes different fonts.
- Chris_Newton 2y ago
  To clarify, I’m not talking about ligatures in programming fonts here. I’d like to use a slightly wider set of Unicode characters, for their designated purposes, as the main and only way to write those ideas. This could include comparison operators, arrows, maybe a few other common and easily recognisable operations. I would like to use those same characters, and where applicable with the same sizes and alignments of related characters, everywhere — in my editor, my linters and formatters, my diff tools and version control system UIs, my greybeard CLI text file batch processing incantations, everywhere. All that really needs is languages that use Unicode characters like ≤, fonts that include all the relevant glyphs, and tools that provide a simple way to enter those characters. But all of these are important, because right now we don’t have simple, standardised ways of doing these things, and so we mostly don’t do them at all. It’s obviously not a big deal, just a small “quality of life” improvement, but it’s 2024 and I don’t see any good reason why we can’t have nice things. :-)
  - teo_zero 2y ago
    The C committee has just deprecated trigraphs. It might be the right time to propose ≠ as alternative to != and then in 40 years we can deprecate != and only keep ≠
    - satiric 2y ago
      How would you type those characters? For me (on mobile) I have a few options: copy it from your message, or google "not equals sign" and copy from the browser, or add a new keyboard that contains the character. On my desktop, I could also memorize windows' alt+x code... none are fantastic options.
      - teo_zero 2y ago
        On mobile I keep "=" pressed for 1 sec and it allows me to type ≈ ≠ and ≡. On Linux I use the sequence Insert, "/", "=", having mapped Insert to act as a Compose key (what other use do you have for it anyway?). On Windows I use the same sequence, having installed wincompose by Sam Hocevar.
  - 2y ago
- alextingle 2y ago
  If your editor just blithely replaces tokens in code, then your alignments are going to be wrong. We write code in monospaced fonts for a reason.
  - swiftcoder 2y ago
    I have never encountered a situation where shrinking the comparison operators from 2 characters to 1 caused a problem for code layout
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

swiftcoder 2y ago

You don't need to modify the language, and most popular editors already support this. You'll need to enable ligature support, and install a font that contains the appropriate ligatures (as many coding-specific fonts already do)

auggierose 2y ago
That's not really a solution, is it, for example I don't want <= to be confused with ≤ within a string. What you propose is just one more half-baked solution that the industry is full of.
- rollcat 2y ago
  That's why you need editor support for this; the lexer understands the difference between an operator and a string literal (that's how syntax highlighting works), and should be able to use ligatures in one context but not the other. (BTW I'm not a fan of coding ligatures myself, but they seem to be popular.)
  - auggierose 2y ago
    Yes, if you do it on top of the lexer it starts to make sense to me. I still think the language should also support the corresponding "ligatures", so that no confusion can result if you happen to enter ≤ directly, but this is actually a nice solution to the problem of what to do in your language aware editor when the user enters <= : nothing! You just assign to different token classes different fonts.
Chris_Newton 2y ago
To clarify, I’m not talking about ligatures in programming fonts here. I’d like to use a slightly wider set of Unicode characters, for their designated purposes, as the main and only way to write those ideas. This could include comparison operators, arrows, maybe a few other common and easily recognisable operations. I would like to use those same characters, and where applicable with the same sizes and alignments of related characters, everywhere — in my editor, my linters and formatters, my diff tools and version control system UIs, my greybeard CLI text file batch processing incantations, everywhere. All that really needs is languages that use Unicode characters like ≤, fonts that include all the relevant glyphs, and tools that provide a simple way to enter those characters. But all of these are important, because right now we don’t have simple, standardised ways of doing these things, and so we mostly don’t do them at all. It’s obviously not a big deal, just a small “quality of life” improvement, but it’s 2024 and I don’t see any good reason why we can’t have nice things. :-)
- teo_zero 2y ago
  The C committee has just deprecated trigraphs. It might be the right time to propose ≠ as alternative to != and then in 40 years we can deprecate != and only keep ≠
  - satiric 2y ago
    How would you type those characters? For me (on mobile) I have a few options: copy it from your message, or google "not equals sign" and copy from the browser, or add a new keyboard that contains the character. On my desktop, I could also memorize windows' alt+x code... none are fantastic options.
    - teo_zero 2y ago
      On mobile I keep "=" pressed for 1 sec and it allows me to type ≈ ≠ and ≡. On Linux I use the sequence Insert, "/", "=", having mapped Insert to act as a Compose key (what other use do you have for it anyway?). On Windows I use the same sequence, having installed wincompose by Sam Hocevar.
- 2y ago
alextingle 2y ago
If your editor just blithely replaces tokens in code, then your alignments are going to be wrong. We write code in monospaced fonts for a reason.
- swiftcoder 2y ago
  I have never encountered a situation where shrinking the comparison operators from 2 characters to 1 caused a problem for code layout

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]