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Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 14:51:00 +1100
Subject: Re: Time we switched to unicode? (was Explanation of this Python language feature?)
From: Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com>
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Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.python:68945

On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 2:29 PM, Roy Smith <roy@panix.com> wrote:
> I started programming on 029 keypunches and ASR-33 teletypes.  If you asked me to
> type most of the punctuation we take for granted today (not to mention lower case
> letters), I would have looked at you as if you had asked me to type something in greek.
>
> Hardware evolves.  I assume that future generations of programmers will have input
> devices better suited to unicode than the clumsy keyboards we use today.

And there you have a circular problem. Until the bulk of programmers
have access to such keyboards, programming languages shouldn't use
such symbols (because most of their users won't be able to type them);
and until programming languages make use of those symbols, there's
little reason to put them on keyboards.

Supporting both may look tempting, but you effectively create two ways
of spelling the exact same thing; it'd be like C's trigraphs. Do you
know what ??= is, without looking it up? [1]

ChrisA

[1] I will accept "An obfuscation tool" as a correct answer here.