Austin Hastings writes:Question in all this: What does one do when they have to _debug_ some code that was written with these lovely Unicode ops, all while stuck in an ASCII world?
I think you guys may be talking at cross purposes. Robin, I think, is talking primarily about coding, while Damian talks of reading.
Perhaps Damian's solution is a Unicode2Ascii perl script that emits formal names, combined with the implementation in Perl of the E<long-assed-ascii-name> alternative spellings.
OTOH, Robin's concern for how to code when you're stuck with 7 bit ascii on the boot console of a Sun box remains valid, and *I* sure would rather have a short name available in a standard way.
Perhaps this is where the "accept Unicode and HTML" philosopy comes in, sort of like the reverse of C< use English; >, to wit:
use asciiops;
...
@list.E<reach>method; # Instead of E<GUILLEMOT, CLOSING QUOTE>
I think that using the POD entities + Unicode is fine, but the solution to giving people who use E<LEFT LOOKING TRIPLE WIGGLY LONG WUNDERBAR RIGHTWARDS, COMBINING> often, I belive, is to be able to define these escapes simply. Either the module writer or the user would map a more usable escape to that character.
Luke
Also, isn't it a pain to type all these characters when they are not on your keyboard? As a predominately Win2k/XP user in the US, I see all these glyphs just fine,but having to remember Alt+0171 for a  is going to get old fast... I much sooner go ahead and write E<raquo> and be done with it.
Thoughts?
-- Rod
