On Wednesday, 14 March 2012 at 13:17:47 UTC, Robert Jacques wrote: <snip>
But there's a reason we use /// instead of ⫻; we shouldn't require custom keyboard mappings in order to program efficiently in D.
Aren't we supposed to be moving towards more natural interfaces in computing? I'm sure that once the touch interface is perfected for text input it would be trivial to have a "coding keyboard" or a "D keyboard". The keyboard mappings would simply come bundled with the compiler.
The current text based programming is quite limiting considering that we actually deal with a tree of tokens. IDEs already manipulate code at the AST level in order to enable refactoring. The next logical step would be to eliminate the text form all together and store code at the AST level, thus avoiding lexing/parsing overhead and the limits of text based representation.
e.g. subtextual.org has cool ideas how to design such a future non textual language. For example, representing Boolean logic in a table instead of arbitrary nested if statements.
