On Sat, Jun 03, 2017 at 01:02:12AM +0200, Ivan Levkivskyi wrote:
> On 3 June 2017 at 00:55, Guido van Rossum <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > [...]
> > So, I am still in favor of the rule "only ASCII in the stdlib".
> >
>
> But what about the other question? Currently, integral, sum, infinity,
> square root etc. Unicode symbols are all prohibited in identifiers.
> Is it possible to allow them?
In the last few months, I've been making a lot of use of the TI Nspire
CAS calculator, and I think that there is very little benefit to
allowing symbols like ∑ √ ∫ (sum, radical/root, integral) unless you
have a proper 2-dimensional template system.
There's not much, if any, benefit to writing:
∫(expression, lower_limit, upper_limit, name)
In fact, that's probably *harder* to read than
integrate(expression, lower_limit, upper_limit, name)
because the important thing, the fact that this is an integral, is
barely visible. Its only a single character. That's not how
mathematicians write it!
If we had a 2D template system, like the Nspire, we could write what
mathematicians do:
(best viewed with a non-proportional font)
b
⌠
⎮ 3 2 1
⎮ x + 2 x − ─── dx
⎮ x
⌡
a
I say "best", but of course even with a monospaced font, it still looks
pretty awful. You really need a proper GUI interface and support for
resizing characters.
I'm not suggesting this be part of Python the language! But It might be
a nice application written for users of Python, perhaps part of Sage or
IPython/Jupiter or a GUI interface to Sympy. You don't need ∫ to be
legal in identifies for that.
--
Steve
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