Rant after trying Rust a bit

[Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d]

On Thu, 2015-08-06 at 14:14 +0000, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d
wrote:
> On Thursday, 6 August 2015 at 13:27:34 UTC, Timon Gehr wrote:
> > I can actually type ≠ and ≤ more quickly than != or <= in my 
> > editor.
> 
> Wow. The only way that I'd know how to get those characters would 
> be to copy-paste them from somewhere. I'm sure that there's a far 
> easier way to generate them, but if a symbol isn't actually on my 
> keyboard, I wouldn't have a clue how to type it, and I would have 
> thought that support for typing it would be editor-specific. In 
> general, I would have expected it to be a total disaster if a 
> language used any non-ASCII characters in its syntax.
> 
> - Jonathan M Davis

As rsw0x said previously, compose keys and construction of non-ASCII
Unicode codepoints have been around for decades. The fixation on "only
ASCII characters" is a hang-over from the 1970s I'm afraid and now it
is 2015 – supposedly.

A neat alternative to the compose key – well actually a strong
accompaniment really – is to allow for multiple keyboard bindings. In
particular I have Greek set up so I can switch from en (en_UK obviously
since that is the only real form of en) to gr very quickly and then I
am typing Greek characters on my UK keyboard. Damn useful for all this
LaTeX maths (*) and general "calculating approximations to π" type
stuff.

More programming languages should get with the Unicode programme.
Obviously not to allow the silly emoticon programs that did the rounds
on Swift's release, but exactly to allow for ≠ « »  ≤ ≥ ¨ etc., etc.,
etc. All the sensible stuff that would make reading programs easier.


(*) NB not math, that is an un-English diminutive :-)
-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at winder.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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