On Thursday, May 21, 2020, at 8:48, Joao S. O. Bueno wrote: > On Wed, 20 May 2020 at 17:17, Mike Miller <python-id...@mgmiller.net> wrote: >> >> >> On 2020-05-20 00:44, Chris Angelico wrote: >> > If you think that a keyboard with fancy arrows on it will take off any >> > quicker, you're extremely hopeful. >> >> While I'm not sure how useful this is in the long run, the oft mentioned >> drawback of "hard to type/view" Unicode chars isn't as insurmountable as >> some think: >> >> - Word processors have had a palette to insert symbols for decades. >> - Editors have had "snippets" for perhaps almost as long. >> - Code formatters such as "go fmt", yapf, black, etc could update them. >> - All maintained OSs support a great majority of Unicode, with font support. >> - AltGr and Compose keys are available. >> >> I've been using Unicode everywhere for about a decade—it's time to retire the >> argument that input is still hard or rare. Dedicated keys are not really >> necessary.
> Input _is_ hard or rare. Deal with it. [...] > It seems that the only sane thing to do is to use a baseline of well > established symbols on source code [...] According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraphs_and_trigraphs, Python is already on thin ice by using the full set of ASCII characters. I wonder how many non-native English speakers have given up on Python because of that. I'm old enough to remember terminals that didn't support lower case letters, let alone "curly braces," and to have used dozens of different keybpards with all sorts of "common" symbols (e.g., [, {, /, \, <) in all sorts of different places. I had a customer who was old enough to use upper case letter O for zero and lower case letter l for 1 because she was old enough to have learned to type before typewriters had number keys; that made a real mess of sorting street addresses. But I digress. Sort of. Yes, some characters are harder to enter for some people at some times. We're all different, and so are our computing tools. Imagine that. When I studied Koine Greek in school (c. 2003 or 2004), I learned what I had to to type up my homework. Was I fast? No, not really. Was I fast enough? Yep. I'm not for full blown, use every Unicode character we can, but I'm not against using characters outside the ISO 646 invariant character set, either. Using π or ϖ as an alias for math.pi? Not too bad. Matched pairs of left/right quotation marks? Maybe, but not without a lot more thought. Different right arrows for different operations? That's asking for trouble. -- “Atoms are not things.” – Werner Heisenberg Dan Sommers, http://www.tombstonezero.net/dan _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/4QXJRU4HMS522MXTFFA2JA7GUGZP6RN6/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
