On Wednesday, April 23, 2014 11:22:33 AM UTC+5:30, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > 25 Unicode characters down, 1114000+ to go :-)
The question would arise if there was some suggestion to add 1114000(+) characters to the syntactic/lexical definition of python. IOW while its true that unicode is a character-set, its better to think of it as a repertory -- here is the universal set from which a choice is available. On Wednesday, April 23, 2014 11:20:35 AM UTC+5:30, Chris Angelico wrote: > On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 3:31 PM, Rustom Mody wrote: > > Chris Angelico wrote: > >> it's impossible for most people to type (and programming with a palette > >> of arbitrary syntactic tokens isn't my idea of fun)... > > Where's the suggestion to use a "palette of arbitrary tokens" ? > > I just tried a greek keyboard; ie do > > $ setxkbmap -option "grp:switch,grp:alt_shift_toggle,grp_led:scroll" > > -layout "us,gr" > > Thereafter typing > > abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz > > after a Shift-Alt > > gives > > αβψδεφγηιξκλμνοπ;ρστθωςχυζ > > One more Shift-Alt and back to roman > Okay. Now what about your other symbols? Your alternative assignment > operator, for instance. How do you type that? In case you missed it, I said: > Of course > - One would need to define such a keyboard (setxkb) > - One would have to find similar technologies for other OSes In more detail: In our normal use of a US-104 keyboard, every letter 'costs' something. eg 'a' costs 1 keystroke 'A' costs 2 (Shift+a) Most people do not count that as a significant cost. and when kids come on this list and talk smsese -- i wanna do so-n-so we chide them for keystrokes at the cost of readability. In such a (default) setup typing a ∧ or ∨ is not possible at all without something like a char-picker and at best has an ergonomic cost that is an order of magnitude higher than the 'naturally available' characters. On the other hand when/if a keyboard mapping is defined in which the characters that are commonly needed are available, it is reasonable to expect the ∨,∧ to cost no more than 2 strokes each (ie about as much as an 'A'; slightly more than an 'a'. Which means that '∨' is expected to cost about the same as 'or' and ∧ to cost less than an 'and' Readability is another question altogether. Random example from my machine calendar.py line 99 If one finds this: return year % 4 == 0 and (year % 100 != 0 or year % 400 == 0) more readable than return year%4=0 ∧ (year%100≠0 ∨ year%100 = 0) then perhaps the following is the most preferred? COMPUTE YEAR MODULO 4 EQUALS 0 AND YEAR MODULO 100 NOT EQUAL TO ZERO OR YEAR MODULO 100 EQUAL to 0 IOW COBOL is desirable? -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
