Updating D beyond Unicode 2.0

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Monday, September 24, 2018 4:19:31 AM MDT Dennis via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Monday, 24 September 2018 at 01:32:38 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> > D the language is well suited to the development of Unicode
> > apps. D source code is another matter.
>
> But in the article you specifically talk about the use of Unicode
> in the context of source code instead of apps:
>
> "With the D programming language, we continuously run up against
> the problem that ASCII has reached its expressivity limits."
>
> "There are the chevrons « and » which serve as another set of
> brackets to lighten the overburdened ambiguities of ( ). There
> are the dot-product and cross-product characters · and × which
> would make lovely infix operator tokens for math libraries. The
> greek letters would be great for math variable names."

Given that the typical keyboard has none of those characters, maintaining
code that used any of them would be a royal pain. It's one thing if they're
used in the occasional string as data, but it's quite another if they're
used as identifiers or operators. I don't see how that would be at all
maintainable. You'd be forced to constantly copy and paste rather than type.

- Jonathan M Davis