On 2006-03-25 at 09:41PST "Jared Updike" wrote: > > 2218 RING OPERATOR > > = composite function > > = APL jot > > 00B0 degree sign > > 25E6 white bullet > > > > I don't think any other Unicode character should be considered. > > That's great but > 1) I have no idea how to type it. Can I easily and comfortably? In emacs?
For emacs, just bind a key (C-. say) to (ucs-insert #X2218). ucs-insert comes from ucs-tables. > 2) Will it show up in PuTTY (and everyone else's terminals/IDEs)? Eventually. > in everyone's mail readers (including Gmail)? Eventually, I should think. I'm using nmh, which has to be one of the least trendy MUAs about, and that can do it. What does this: â look like in your email reader? > 3) What encoding do my textfiles need to be in Probably utf-8 > (i.e. how many bytes per char)? a bit more than one on average. > How do I do that? Depends on the OS you are using. I've got locale set to en_GB.UTF-8 and it all more or less works. > Does Haskell even support everything related to Unicode > that we'd need? Not now, but Haskell' jolly well ought to. > If the answers are satisfactory to all these questions, > then Unicode is a good idea (and that's the ideal > character). "Satisfactory" is in the eye of the beholder. > If not, we're sadly stuck in ASCII land. It's far worse than that. We are stuck in an idiotic land where the meaning of a file depends on the meaning of a user settable variable in the OS. This is one of the many unpleasant consequences of untyped filesystems¹. Oh, and Haskell claims already to have unicode source files, but the compilers can't handle it. > Jared. > > P.S. Plus that opens a lot of cans of worms for writing programs with > all those fancy symbols! APL here we come! It's a question of good style, isn't it? Using â instead of -> might be nice, but stringing together lots of arcane symbols like ââ°Ⱐwouldn't be. For Haskell 98 I argued against unicode, preferring that we should stick with ASCII, but nowadays a language that doesn't handle unicode properly is going to look shabby in a few years. Jón [1] Something about which something should be done in Haskell... -- Jón Fairbairn Jon.Fairbairn at cl.cam.ac.uk _______________________________________________ Haskell-prime mailing list Haskell-prime@haskell.org http://haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-prime