UTF-8 operator possibilities

[Michael Lazzaro]

Here is more to think about. No freaking out, this is just for mulling...

If we, for the moment, assume the use of «op» for hypers, that obviously raises the _possibility_ of using some other Unicode/UTF-8 characters for other "very special" tasks. I'm not actually advocating most of these (no APL, please) but note that some chars might have distinct possibilities, especially with superpositions:

-- a wide variety of unary and binary ops, some obscure, some obvious:

± × ÷ ≤ ≥ ≠ ≅ ≈ ≡
∩ ∪ ⊂ ⊃ ⊆ ⊇ ∈ ⊄ ∉
⇒ ⇔
∧ ∨ ∴ ∀ ∃ ∠ ⊥ ∝ √ ∫ ∇ ∅ ⊕ ⊗ ∍

† ‡ ˇ ∑ ∏ ∆ Ω ¡ ¿ ¬ ∂ • º ©

(including things like:)

∑@array - summation
∏@array - product
±$x - { any(+$^x,-$^x) }

$v ∈ @array; # element of


-- possible alternate separators in place of ';', where ';'
would result in doing a very, very wrong thing:

for (@x • @y) -> ($x • $y) { ... } - (bullet)
for (@x ∫ @y) -> ($x ∫ $y) { ... }
for (@x ‡ @y) -> ($x ‡ $y) { ... }
for (@x † @y) -> ($x † $y) { ... }
for (@x ⊥ @y) -> ($x ⊥ $y) { ... }


-- a global var like "epsilon" or "mu" that sets a +-bound
for "like" comparisions between floating point nums,
to locally allow comparisions with a settable degree
of accuracy:

{
temp µ = 0.00005;
( 10/3 == (1/3) * 10 ); # FALSE, floating point issues
( 10/3 ~~ (1/3) * 10 ); # TRUE, is within µ
}

(OK, we could name that $EPSILON, or anything else in ASCII.
but you gotta admit it looks really slick. If you can see it.)
;-)


-- *plenty* more wierd bracketing and quotelikes, if you dare:

«thing»
‡thing‡
†thing†
∫thing∫
§thing§
¶thing¶
≤thing≥


-- and, of course, terms (e.g. "duh" synonyms)

∞ - Inf
π - Pi
ø - null set


Just something to think about -- No reason to go all APLish, but if we find we need another few chars for some obscure but incredibly useful operations, there _are_ possibilities. Depends primarily on which characters are most widely recognized on the various platforms, and how confident we are or aren't that we should say "deal with it" to people with non-Unicode-capable editors.

And note that using special chars for special things may increase readability significantly, since we don't have to worry as much about similar-looking punctuational strings doing completely different things, which is already a bit of a problem.

Oh, and here's another tip for you OSX types:

From within Mail, choose Format -> Font -> Show Fonts.
From the "Extras" menu, choose "Show Characters"

.... you are presented with the grouped listings for every character that exists on your computer, along with Unicode identifiers. Double click them to insert them into your email. :-) (Note that you can also use it in BBEdit.)

MikeL