On Monday, November 4, 2002, at 08:55 AM, Brent Dax wrote:
Well, yes! :-)... but also because they are unique characters compared to all the other existing prefix/postfix/binary/quotelike operators, so there pretty much zero chance of ambiguity. Using just a few Unicode symbols would seriously open up the range of possible "sensible" operators, without causing the kind of mind-numbing ambiguities and subtle no-not-this-I-mean-that we've seen in the whole xor/hyper discussions.# Can't we have our cake and eat it too? Give ASCII digraph or # trigraph alternatives for the incoming tide of Perl6 Unicode?The Unicode version is more typing than the non-Unicode version, so what's the advantage? It's prettier?
UTF-8 «op» representations have the advantage of trivially not conflicting with _any_ existing operators, and being visually distinct from all of them. There may be a few other things in easy-to-find-and-type Latin1, like one or two of these:
• ≈ ∫ ∆ ® © § ∑ Ω ∆ ¶ ‡ ± ˇ ¿
That could maybe fill in for ';' in the cases where ';' has been given a sneaky meaning, or represent some infrequent but terrifically useful unary or binary op, etc.
C'mon, everybody's doing it! First one's free, kid... ;-)
MikeL
