Dan Sugalski writes:
: Have you considered allowing Unicode characters as alternatives to some of
: the less pleasant looking bits? $foo<<1>> (where << and >> are the double
: angle characters) as an alternative to $foo\Q[1] if the user's got the
: characters handy?
Actually, my first thought a year or three ago was to replace qw()
with «», but we just aren't there with the Unicode editors yet.
My keyboard seems to be missing a few of the characters, too. :-)
I won't tell you what I had to go through just to get those two
characters into this message, and they're still only in Latin-1.
So my take is that people should be able to define their operators up
into the Unicode range if that makes them happy, and they don't plan to
ship their code widely in the next year or two. After that, once most
of the artificial cross-cultural barriers are torn down, we'll be left
with the real cross-cultural barriers, which will be a little harder to
get over. Americans will be slow in picking up Kanji, I suspect.
But the APL operators are foreign to just about everyone, so that
handicaps us all equally.
By the way, $¾ is not valid Perl, comments on Slashdot notwithstanding.
Variables still have to start with a letter (or ideograph). It might
well be the case that ¾ could be defined to return 0.75, however.
Larry
