Adding Unicode operators to D

[Kevin Bealer]

Andrei Alexandrescu Wrote:

> Please vote up before the haters take it down, and discuss:
> 
> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/78rjk/allowing_unicode_operators_in_d_similarly_to/
> 
> 
> Andrei

I think this is a bad idea -- there are a lot of places that don't use Unicode or don't support 8 bit clean
translation, and the operators in question would be a pain to use every time they were needed, since
there is no obvious way to type them.  And I don't just mean organizations that drag their feet, but also special cases within every new technology that have these blind spots.  Does your cell phone web browser correctly display these symbols?  Does the program "less" display these correctly?  If you
think it's just a matter of time, maybe, but consider that IBM still uses EBCDIC internally in mainframes.

A lot of languages using only punctuation based syntax are already hard to read because of it, e.g. Perl can be very hard to read in some cases.  Using the word "and" would make a lot of languages easier to read than using "&&".  The standardized meanings should be kept, but I would favor something like $( stuff )$, $[ more stuff ]$ and so on rather than using special unicode tokens.

We're not using "#" and "$" effectively, I would favor something like "$" to modify bracket usage and
"#text" to indicate special symbols as an extension of the #line and #function directives.  If ".operation" is good enough for every method call, then why make $ or # or @ into extension points,
rather than importing thousands of individual extension operators that are only readable in the unicode-speaking contexts.

Kevin