On Thu, May 21, 2020 at 06:48:55PM +0300, Serhiy Storchaka wrote: > 21.05.20 16:45, Alex Hall пише: > >≥ instead of >= might be an improvement because that's a > >symbol learned in school, but ultimately the student still needs to > >learn what `>=` means as it will be used most of the time. > > But in my school I learned ⩾, not ≥. It was used in USSR and I believe > in other European countries (maybe it is French or Germany tradition?).
As far as I am aware, there is no mathematical difference between the two greater-than-or-equal operators ⩾ and ≥ it is a purely stylistic issue, just as some fonts use two lines in dollar signs and some only one. I don't know why Unicode gives them two different code points, but if I were a betting man, I would put money on it being because some legacy character set provided them both. (One of the motivations of Unicode is to allow the round-tripping from every common legacy charset without loss.) > If Python will become accepting ≥ as an alias of >=, I insist that it > should accept also ⩾. And ⊃, because it is the symbol used for superset > relations for sets (currently written as >= in Python). An annoying thing about superset and subset operators is that mathematicians don't agree on whether the superset symbol ⊃ is strict or not. This is why we also have unambiguous symbols ⊇ (superset-or-equal) and ⊋ (strict superset not equal). > And maybe other > national or domain specific mathematical symbols. Imagine confusion when > >=, ≥, ⩾ and ⊃ are occurred in the same program. Imagine the confusion if somebody had variables spam, Spam, sPAM, SPam, sPAm. Or worse, SPΑM, SPАM and SPAM. *wink* Let's not worry too much encouraging people's bad habits. People can write obfuscated code in any language. I am sure that before this is a problem, linters and code formatters like black will keep it under control. -- Steven _______________________________________________ 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/5727HGSASTJSUYSQMQ3H3UAXY4R57HMV/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
