Rustom Mody wrote: > Let there be a hundred different versions, then people will > begin to clamor against the non-necessity of the penury-of-ASCII: > > http://blog.languager.org/2015/01/unicode-and-universe.html
Almost 30 years ago, Apple's Hypertalk language allowed, and encouraged, the use of certain non-ASCII symbols. You could use ≤ ≥ and ≠ for less-or-equal, greater-or-equal, and not-equal comparisons; you could use ÷ for division; and you could define a square root function using √ as the name. You could even define ∞ = 'INF' and do floating point operations on it. Apple could get away with this back in the 80s because they controlled the platform including keyboard mappings, and they could guarantee that key combinations such as Option-/ would generate the ÷ character and that any reasonable font would include a glyph for it. Alas and alack, 30 years on and we have to live with the down-side of multicultural computers. Any modern Linux system is almost sure to be fully Unicode compatible with a UTF-8 filesystem -- *almost* sure. But we have to interoperate with Windows machines still stuck in the Dark Ages of "code pages"; Java that insists that Unicode == UTF-16 (and support for the supplementary multilingual planes is weak); there is a plethora of fonts but Unicode support is extremely variable; many of us are using US keyboards and there's no well-known or standard input method for Unicode characters; and while Apple only had to support somewhat fewer than 256 characters, Unicode has tens of thousands. Before Unicode can take off for programming syntax, we need to solve at least four problems: - we need a good selection of decent programmer's fonts with extensive support for Unicode especially mathematical symbols; - we need a platform-independent input method that will allow programmers to enter these symbols without moving their hands off the keyboard; - and some way to make the existence of these symbols easily discoverable, e.g. for most of us, ~ is easily discoverable because we can see it on the keyboard, but the same doesn't apply for ≈ - we have to be confident that moving source code from one machine to another (Windows -> Linux or visa versa) won't corrupt the file. That means UTF-8 everywhere. I live in hope, but I am not confident that these issues will be solved in my lifetime. One of the ten most popular programming languages, PHP, doesn't even support Unicode even as a data type. What hope do we have? -- Steven -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list