On Tuesday, March 25, 2014 7:13:09 PM UTC+5:30, Antoon Pardon wrote: > 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. Ok > 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 Nice > 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 Super! Anything but a (randomly overloaded) +! > 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. A bit unreadable out here but not too bad -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
