On Tue, 24 Jan 2006 04:09:00 +0100, Christoph Zwerschke wrote: > On the page http://wiki.python.org/moin/Python3%2e0Suggestions > I noticed an interesting suggestion: > > "These operators ≤ ≥ ≠ should be added to the language having the > following meaning: > > <= >= != > > this should improve readibility (and make language more accessible to > beginners). > > This should be an evolution similar to the digraphe and trigraph > (digramme et trigramme) from C and C++ languages." > > How do people on this group feel about this suggestion? > > The symbols above are not even latin-1, you need utf-8. > > (There are not many usefuls symbols in latin-1. Maybe one could use × > for cartesian products...)
Or for multiplication :-) > And while they are better readable, they are not better typable (at > least with most current editors). > > Is this idea absurd or will one day our children think that restricting > to 7-bit ascii was absurd? > > Are there similar attempts in other languages? I can only think of APL, > but that was a long time ago. My earliest programming was on (classic) Macintosh, which supported a number of special characters including ≤ ≥ ≠ with the obvious meanings. They were easy to enter too: the Mac keyboard had (has?) an option key, and holding the option key down while typing a character would enter a special character. E.g. option-s gave Greek sigma, option-p gave pi, option-less-than gave ≤, and so forth. Much easier than trying to memorize character codes. I greatly miss the Mac's ease of entering special characters, and I miss the ability to use proper mathematical symbols for (e.g.) pi, not equal, and so forth. > Once you open your mind for using non-ascii symbols, I'm sure one can > find a bunch of useful applications. Variable names could be allowed to > be non-ascii, as in XML. Think class names in Arabian... Or you could > use Greek letters if you run out of one-letter variable names, just as > Mathematicians do. Would this be desirable or rather a horror scenario? > Opinions? I think the use of digraphs like != for not equal is a poor substitute for a real not-equal symbol. I think the reliance of 7-bit ASCII is horrible and primitive, but without easier, more intuitive ways of entering non-ASCII characters, and better support for displaying non-ASCII characters in the console, I can't see this suggestion going anywhere. -- Steven. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list