Austin Hastings wrote:
The << and >> ... are just as pictographic (or not) as [ and ].
I'm not particularly fond of << or >> either. ;) Damian just wrote that he prefers non-alphabetic operators to help differentiate nouns and verbs. I find it helpful when people explain their biases like that. What's yours?
They look the same from top or bottom, and are unmistakable in direction when looked at from either side.
Well, anything can look like itself, that wasn't the point. The goal is to not look like anything else in any orientation. The chars O and 0 fail badly, but A and T are excellent. I'm not sure where << and >> fall because I don't have any experience with them. Programming languages probably get away with more because most programmers don't spray paint algorithms on the side of a bridge. (Well, Lisp programmers maybe. ;) My three points against arbitrary punctuation as symbols are (1) it's impossible to identify symbol boundaries when reading punctuation -- you just have to guess, (2) it's harder to work with punctuation in non-digital communication, and (3) my memory doesn't work well on punctuation symbols! Perl has some nice features like sigils that clue people in on how to read a sentence. But...
difference between ' (apostrophe) and ` (tick)
is a horrible abomination. ;)
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.
Non sequitur. Written language prior to the printing press had no technological reason to limit alphabet size. Some languages developed very large pictographic representations, others developed small alphabets with word formation rules. I have no idea what the design pressures were that caused these different solutions. Do you? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the approaches? Why should we select one over the other? - Ken