On Tuesday, March 25, 2014 7:53:23 PM UTC+5:30, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > On Tue, 25 Mar 2014 05:53:45 -0700, Rustom Mody wrote:
> > 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!! > :-) > Full Unicode support in a language is, alas, a double-edged sword. While > it has advantages, it also has disadvantages. > py> А = 1 > py> A = А + 1 > py> assert A == А > Traceback (most recent call last): > AssertionError Even with 'good' ol ASCII giving enough trouble between O and 0, 1 and l, we certainly dont want more such headaches! In apps, a serious consideration of unicode entails a cycle of i18n and l10n. The l10n for programming languages is arguably harder -- if python is 'localized' to some (human) language L, maybe all the builtins should be also translated? And whats the use of that without full translation of the docs? Its not a pleasing thought... Something intermediate needs to be found... Some thoughts (quite half cooked): 1. Human -- 'natural' -- languages and math are not in the same category If Cyrillic A gets in Roman probably shouldn't. 2. There needs to be some intermediate binding time -- eg when the system is installed -- when suitable char-tables are set up. Case-in-point: Many folks in haskell-land have wanted to replace the '\' with the 'λ'. This has not worked out so far because λ belongs to the same unicode class as other lower-case letters. So since this is possible: Prelude> let λ = 1 Prelude> λ 1 Prelude> the other more-natural-to-haskell usage is precluded. So these classes need to be changeable and late-bindable. Not as late as runtime but later than build-time. Probably same as the choice of locales on a system > While I can see the appeal of certain Unicode symbols, I really wouldn't > like to have to deal with code that looks like this: > x∫2*y+∬e**3∺z≹(x+1)≽y⋝w > If I wanted line-noise, I know where to get Perl :-) Yes... neither Perl nor Cobol is pleasant -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
