> From: "Markus Laire" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Date: Sat, 02 Nov 2002 14:44:39 +0200 > > On 2 Nov 2002 at 0:06, Simon Cozens wrote: > > More and more conversations like this, (and how many have we seen here > > already?) about characters sets, encodings, mail quoting issues, in > > fact, anything other than Perl, will be rife on every Perl-related > > mailing list if we persist with this idiotic idea of having Unicode > > operators. > > It may seem idiotic to the egocentric people who only needs chars a-z > in his language. But for all others (think about Chinese), Unicode is > real asset.
I don't think anyone's arguing that unicode shouldn't be in the language. I am all for allowing people to define their own unicode operators and such. I just don't think it should be in the core. I do most of my work over an ssh connection to my favorite server, through gnome-terminal. gnome-terminal does not support unicode, so this whole thread has been filled with ?'s and \251's. I can't see a thing... And I'm a mostly typical geek. I _finally_ got unicode working in Emacs, though it was not easy. I still haven't any idea how to type these things, just look at them. Think about how much trouble a less-geeky-than-I person would have. We _want_ the world to be unicode compatible, for sure. But having a useful operator in unicode isn't quite the answer. Rather than fixing their boxes to work with unicode, like we on this list would, they simply wouldn't use the operator. I don't quite think this is the desired effect. I'm fine with having tolerable synonyms. Vector plus shouldn't be "`<<[+]>>" but I'm okay with it being "^[+]" or some such. The only thing to think about there is what will happen when someone writes in unicode, then someone comes along in maintainance without a unicode-compatible editor. It will surely be perplexing to see vector plus written ?+?. Of course, this is equivalent to the problem of unicode variable names, so the point is moot. Luke
