I was reading about Scala this week and noticed that the grammar explicitly supports unicode glyphs for certain tokens, in particular ← (Unicode \u2190) is the same as <- and ⇒ (Unicode \u21D2) is the same as =>. Other languages are doing this too, but there are some issues with doing this.
On US keyboards non-ASCII characters are a hassle to type, but with touch devices, the keyboards are all defined in software anyhow, so even the APL character set is finally open to consideration. In Smalltalk one could hack the compiler to support these symbols, but I'm not so sure about Lively. But I'm thinking about more than just compiler tokens, this opens up all sorts of geeky math possibilities for end users and programmers. Unfortunately my imagination is so far limited to applications like domain-specific or localized programming languages. Most programs are written using the Latin character set these days, but there's no good reason not to tokenize Chinese text or anything else for that matter. Touch devices are generally considered to be "content consumption" devices rather than development environments but Lively could change that. The question is how much of this is possible in a Javascript-based environment. _______________________________________________ lively-kernel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/listinfo/lively-kernel
