On Mon, Nov 04, 2002 at 10:19:55AM -0800, Michael Lazzaro wrote: > 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 ¿
I've actually got my eye on ≈ (U+2248 ALMOST EQUAL TO) as a replacement for ~~ someday in the distant future. I suppose it could be argued that we should use ≅ (U+2245 APPROXIMATELY EQUAL TO) instead. That's what =~ was supposed to represent, after all... > 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. You know, separate streams in a for loop are not going to be that common in practic, so maybe we should look around a little harder for a supercomma that isn't a semicolon. Now *that* would be a big step in reducing ambiguity... Even if we limit ourselves to Latin1 for now, there's things like the broken pipe ¦ and logical not ¬ and such that look useful. I'd avoid using standard signs like multiply × and divide ÷ for non-standard purposes though. (Not that we can exactly use multiply even for its standard purpose--there's an awfully heavy resemblance between × and x, at least in the typical sans serif font.) It would be really funny to use cent ¢, pound £, or yen ¥ as a sigil, though... > C'mon, everybody's doing it! First one's free, kid... ;-) People who believe slippery slope arguments should never go skiing. On the other hand, even the useful slippery slopes have "beginner" slopes. I think one advantage of using Unicode for advanced features is that it *looks* scary. So in general we should try to keep the basic features in ASCII, and only use Unicode where there be dragons. It will certainly be possible to write APL in Perl, but if you do, you'll get what you deserve. In fact, the problem with APL is not that it's possible to write APL in it, but that it is impossible not to... :-) Larry
