Adding Unicode operators to D

[Bill Baxter]

On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 3:42 AM, Spacen Jasset <spacenjasset at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> I haven't really ever felt the need for such things. It would require editor
> support and I think that it could hinder readability as one would have to
> know that symbol 'x' is say, crossproduct. -- It isn't always, it depends on
> the mathematical domain.
>
> There are, I belive, far more pressing matters, and this feature would make
> editor support a bit more difficult, and we are currently in the days where
> there isn't enough editor and/or ide support for D. I would personally
> prefer it not be added to the language in the near future, this is of course
> only my perferance, which in honesty may be biased but isn't entirely for
> self reasons.
>

I think that's the conclusion I'm coming too as well.  While the use
of Unicode would have some advantages, there are various technical
issues with it (like I haven't been able to figure out how to get the
DOS console in Windows to display UTF-8).  I think those issues can
all be solved, but it would be a large distraction for the D
community.  Better to let some big, well-funded, massively popular
language pioneer in this area.  If some language with a billion
programmers decided to use Unicode, then you can bet that most of
these infrastructure problems would start to disappear quickly as
annoyed programmers start scratching their own itches and as they
start complaining to the people who write the tools they use.

Realistically, if I complain to any software vendor now that their
editor doesn't work well with D because they don't have funky Unicode
functionality, the response is likely to be "Sounds like a problem
with D, whatever that is".  If the language were Java or C++, though,
they would have little choice but to take the complaint seriously,
regardless of the effort required.

--bb