On Thursday, February 12, 2015 at 11:59:55 PM UTC+5:30, John Ladasky wrote:
> On Thursday, February 12, 2015 at 3:08:10 AM UTC-8, Fabien wrote:
>
> > ... what a coincidence then that a huge majority of scientists
> > (including me) dont care AT ALL about unicode. But since scientists are
> > not paid to rewrite old code, the scientific world is still stuck to
> > python 2.
>
> I'm a scientist. I'm a happy Python 3 user who migrated from Python 2 about
> two years ago.
>
> And I use Unicode in my Python. In implementing some mathematical models
> which have variables like delta, gamma, and theta, I decided that I didn't
> like the line lengths I was getting with such variable names. I'm using δ,
> γ, and θ instead. It works fine, at least on my Ubuntu Linux system (and
> what scientist doesn't use Linux?). I also have special mathematical
> symbols, superscripted numbers, etc. in my program comments. It's easier to
> read 2x³ + 3x² than 2*x**3 + 3*x**2.
>
> I am teaching someone Python who is having a few problems with Unicode on his
> Windows 7 machine. It would appear that Windows shipped with a
> less-than-complete Unicode font for its command shell. But that's not
> Python's fault.
Haskell is a bit ahead of python in this respect:
Prelude> let (x₁ , x₂) = (1,2)
Prelude> (x₁ , x₂)
(1,2)
>>> (x₁ , x₂) = (1,2)
File "<stdin>", line 1
(x₁ , x₂) = (1,2)
^
SyntaxError: invalid character in identifier
But python is ahead in another (arguably more) important aspect:
Haskell gets confused by ligatures in identifiers; python gets them right
>>> flag = 1
>>> flag
1
Prelude> let flag = 1
Prelude> flag
<interactive>:4:1: Not in scope: `flag'
Hopefully python will widen its identifier-chars also
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