Bruno Medeiros wrote:
Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
Spacen Jasset wrote:
Bill Baxter wrote:
On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 7:27 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Please vote up before the haters take it down, and discuss:
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/78rjk/allowing_unicode_operators_in_d_similarly_to/
(My comment cross posted here from reddit)
I think the right way to do it is not to make everything Unicode. All
the pressure on the existing symbols would be dramatically relieved by
the addition of just a handful of new symbols.
The truth is keyboards aren't very good for inputting Unicode. That
isn't likely to change. Yes they've dealt with the problem in Asian
languages by using IMEs but in my opinion IMEs are horrible to use.
Some people seem to argue it's a waste to go to Unicode only for a few
symbols. If you're going to go Unicode, you should go whole hog. I'd
argue the exact opposite. If you're going to go Unicode, it should be
done in moderation. Use as little Unicode as necessary and no more.
As for how to input unicode -- Microsoft Word solved that problem ages
ago, assuming we're talking about small numbers of special characters.
It's called AutoCorrect. You just register your unicode symbol as a
misspelling for "(X)" or something unique like that and then every
time you type "(X)" a funky unicode character instantly replaces those
chars.
Yeh, not many editors support such a feature. But it's very easy to
implement. And with that one generic mechanism, your editor is ready
to support input of Unicode chars in any language just by adding the
right definitions.
--bb
I am not entirely sure that 30 or (x amount) of new operators would
be a good thing anyway. How hard is it to say m3 =
m1.crossProduct(m2) ? vs m3 = m1 X m2 ? and how often will that
happen? It's also going to make the language more difficult to learn
and understand.
I have noticed that in pretty much all scientific code, the f(a, b)
and a.f(b) notations fall off a readability cliff when the number of
operators grows only to a handful. Lured by simple examples like
yours, people don't see that as a problem until they actually have to
read or write such code. Adding temporaries and such is not that great
because it further takes the algorithm away from its mathematical form
just for serving a notation that was the problem in the first place.
But what operators would be added? Some mathematician programmers might
want vector and matrix operators, others set operators, others still
derivation/integration operators, and so on. Where would we stop?
I don't deny it might be useful for them, but it does seem like too
specific a need to integrate in the language.
Perhaps what needs to be added is a syntax for defining character to
function correspondence? That way people could define the binary
functions that they need, and then define a corresponding character
string that represented it. I once recommended that Eiffel include a
means of defining user operators (i.e., binary functions that sit
between the terms on which the operate) using the name syntax thusly:
Starts and ends with '|' and doesn't contain any whitespace. Must be
surrounded by whitespace when used. I.e. 1 |X|-3 would be forbidden, as
there is no whitespace following the |X| operator.
That still seems like a good rule to me. If you want to include
unicode, that's no problem. And the function could also be used as:
X(1, -3)
with identical meaning. I.e., marking a function as an operator by
surrounding it with pipes would be purely syntax sugar. Note that such
operators would have a precedence higher than assignment, but lower than
everything else, so in practice the choice would be between writing:
X (1, -3)
and writing:
(1 |X| -3)
unless all one were doing is making an assignment. This is analogous to
the class member variable in object methods, or the class name in class
methods, except that that is often understood.
OTOH, I'm not certain how much such syntax buys you.
P.S.: another possibility, which is more in line with current D syntax
requires an assignment of the operator character to a function that
starts with op. As in '+' is associated with opAdd. However even
though this is more in line with current D syntax, it seems to buy you a
lot less. And it seems to require that the operator be a single
character. This appears to me to be more work than it's worth for the
return. Even the approach that I suggested is probably marginal.
P.P.S: Any system that requires that a specific IDE or editor be used
is no going to work. Not unless the IDE were provided with the
language, and even then the most successful examples I can thing of are
EMACS and Smalltalk. (I'm excluding programs that don't run on Linux,
as I have no familiarity with either how they function or how popular
they are. Probably, though, one could include Visual Basic and maybe
some others. But one certainly couldn't include Basic, merely one
dialect of it.)
