I have quite a few fonts, the only one I can find where | is a broken bar is "Terminal", a font for DOS programs that uses the cp437 charset, which is incompatable with latin1 (« and » are AE and AF instead of AB and BB) and it dosen't even have a ¦. So, it dosen't seem like a problem.
It is still easy to confuse, but why worry? Larry's suggestion to use ¥ (JPY-sign) looks much better anyway.
I think it is always important to remember that it is not only writing Perl6, but also reading Perl6 that has to be doable. Two many equivalent ways to write the same thing mean that the reader has to learn more. I think that Perl is very strong with the writing part. It is relatively easy and efficient to write in Perl, but the reading part is more of a challenge. That 1 and l look so similar is just due to the stupid convention to use fonts that make these two look very similar for source codes. But why add another problem with | and ¦ which do look similar if the resolution and size are low, if the ¥ can do the same thing in a better way? Introducing a "z" as a second alternative instead of ¥ might also cost something in terms of learning to read perl. The infix-operators that consist of letters are something that has to be learned very well in order to read perl-sources that have been written by others. So it might be good to have not too many of them.
Best regards,
Karl
