--- Ken Fox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Austin Hastings wrote: > > The question is not about being ISO-phobic or pro-English. **
The two gripes I've heard have been: 1- It's hard to type. 2- I don't know how to type it on platform X. With combo gripe "It'll be hard to remember how to type it across multiple platforms X, Y, Z, etc." coming in third. So I solved that problem. I know it's easy to type on Mac, I know how to MAKE it easy to type on WinPC, and I know how to MAKE it easy to type on an X terminal. In all cases, [OPTION] or [ALT] plus some matching set of punctuation [(slashes) or (brackets)]. Now it's easy to type (easier, for me at least, than typing two backticks, since the modifier level is the same and the hand-contortion on a PC type keyboard [with ` and ~ in the top left corner] is much lower), and not too difficult to remember, even across N platforms. So I'll treat your objection, below, as a new one. > The question is whether we want a pictographic language. I like > the size of the English alphabet. It produces fairly short words, > but the words are very robust (people can read words in all > orientations, backwards, upside down, in crazy fonts, hand-written, > etc.) This is the opposite of Huffman encoding, but just > as useful IMHO. The << and >> (rendered thus for Mr. Reed) are just as pictographic (or not) as [ and ]. They look the same from top or bottom, and are unmistakable in direction when looked at from either side. Likewise, they are probably MORE clear, as has been mentioned, than the difference between ' (apostrophe) and ` (tick) in many standard fonts, especially the variable-width variety sometimes invoked for 8-bit messages. But in this context, we've got a pair of balanced, unmistakable characters which have no other uses (compare, say, %hash and $a %= $b; same character '%', different usages) being proposed to serve as the marker for a new class of operation. > ... > Exponents are just written a bit smaller and a bit raised. Is this > what we want in the core? If every keyboard and operating system had the ability to simply generate arbitrary expressions of the form (expr-a) ** (expr-b), ad infinitum (a ** b ** c ** d ** e) then we'd be remiss not to use it. But they can't, so we don't. > ... > ** I'm probably both. ISO-phobic because I actually represented my > company on an ISO standard committee. You have my sympathy. =Austin __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? HotJobs - Search new jobs daily now http://hotjobs.yahoo.com/
