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Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 14:43:09 +0100
From: Antoon Pardon <antoon.pardon@rece.vub.ac.be>
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Subject: Re: Time we switched to unicode? (was Explanation of this Python language feature?)
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On 25-03-14 13:53, Rustom Mody wrote:
> On Tuesday, March 25, 2014 4:08:38 PM UTC+5:30, Antoon Pardon wrote:
>> So? We do use + -, so why shouldn't we use × for multiplication. Would
>> such a use already indicate I should use a mathematical front-end?
>> When a programming language is borrowing concepts from mathematics,
>> I see no reason not to borrow the symbols used too.
> Well...
> Matters of taste are personal, touchy-feely things and not easily 
> explainable.
>
> Some of mine:
> * for multiply does not bother me; ** for power for some reason does.
> Even though the only standard math notation is non-linear and is off-limits
>
> 'and' bothers me slightly (maybe because I was brought up on Pascal?)
> '&&' less (and then C)
> ∧ is of course best (I am a Dijkstra fan)
> [But then Dijkstra would probably roll over and over in his grave at
> short-circuit 'and'. Non-commutative?!?! Blasphemy!]
>
> ÷ for some reason seems inappropriate
> (some vague recollection that its an only English; Europeans dont use it??)

> It doesn't bother me. IIRC in primary school before fractions were introduced,
> a colon was used to indicate division.
>
> And if we had hyphen '‐' distinguished from minus '-' then we could have lispish
> names like call‐with‐current‐continuation properly spelt.
> And then generations of programmers will thank us for increasing their
> debugging overtime!! 
>
Sure we could argue some partciculars. Personnaly I would prefer an up-arrow
for exponentiation.

IMO the advantage would be mainly in allowing more disambiguity. So that if
you as a programmer think about something as an operator, you are not obligated
to somehow force it into the mold of + - * / % //.

If → would have been used for attribute access, then we could just write 
5→to_bytes(4, "little") without having to consider that the lexer would
try to interpret it as a floating point.

And maybe ⤚ could have been used for concatenation. Which would mean that
if you had a class whose instances could both be added and concatenated,
you could implement both as an operator.

Finally, I think I would prefer the middle dot ⸱ for lispish names so
we would have call⸱with⸱current⸱continuation.