On 25-03-14 13:53, Rustom Mody wrote: > On Tuesday, March 25, 2014 4:08:38 PM UTC+5:30, Antoon Pardon wrote: >> So? We do use + -, so why shouldn't we use × for multiplication. Would >> such a use already indicate I should use a mathematical front-end? >> When a programming language is borrowing concepts from mathematics, >> I see no reason not to borrow the symbols used too. > Well... > Matters of taste are personal, touchy-feely things and not easily > explainable. > > Some of mine: > * for multiply does not bother me; ** for power for some reason does. > Even though the only standard math notation is non-linear and is off-limits > > 'and' bothers me slightly (maybe because I was brought up on Pascal?) > '&&' less (and then C) > ∧ is of course best (I am a Dijkstra fan) > [But then Dijkstra would probably roll over and over in his grave at > short-circuit 'and'. Non-commutative?!?! Blasphemy!] > > ÷ for some reason seems inappropriate > (some vague recollection that its an only English; Europeans dont use it??)
> It doesn't bother me. IIRC in primary school before fractions were introduced, > a colon was used to indicate division. > > And if we had hyphen '‐' distinguished from minus '-' then we could have > lispish > names like call‐with‐current‐continuation properly spelt. > And then generations of programmers will thank us for increasing their > debugging overtime!! > Sure we could argue some partciculars. Personnaly I would prefer an up-arrow for exponentiation. IMO the advantage would be mainly in allowing more disambiguity. So that if you as a programmer think about something as an operator, you are not obligated to somehow force it into the mold of + - * / % //. If → would have been used for attribute access, then we could just write 5→to_bytes(4, "little") without having to consider that the lexer would try to interpret it as a floating point. And maybe ⤚ could have been used for concatenation. Which would mean that if you had a class whose instances could both be added and concatenated, you could implement both as an operator. Finally, I think I would prefer the middle dot ⸱ for lispish names so we would have call⸱with⸱current⸱continuation. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
