Proposal: struct and array literal syntax

[Daniel Keep]

Bruno Medeiros wrote:
> Andrei Khropov wrote:
> 
>> Boris Wang wrote:
>>
>>> "Andrei Khropov" <andkhropov at nospam_mtu-net.ru>
>>> P4HkO{O"PBNE:e7b7fb$277d$1 at digitaldaemon.com...
>>>
>>>> Derek Parnell wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Now a 'rectangular' array ...
>>>>>
>>>>>  int[][]![
>>>>>      int[]![1,2,3,4],
>>>>>      int[]![5,6,7,8],
>>>>>      int[]![9,0,1,2],
>>>>>      int[]![3,4,5,6],
>>>>>    ]
>>>>>
>>>>> Hmmm ... appears to do okay.
>>>>
>>>> Well, in the last case inner int[]! s appear to be a syntactic 
>>>> overhead.
>>>>
>>>> I'm still waiting for better handling of multidimensional rectangular
>>>> arrays (not less effective "jagged").
>>>>
>>>> --  AKhropov
>>>>
>>> May be:
>>>
>>> int[][]![
>>>     ![1,2,3,4],
>>>     ![5,6,7,8],
>>>     ![9,0,1,2],
>>>     ![3,4,5,6],
>>> ]
>>>
>>> the type of ![1,2,3,4] can be inferred.
>>
>>
>> In the spirit of the recent type inference extensions the outer type 
>> should be
>> inferred also: just
>>
>> ![
>>     ![1,2,3,4],
>>     ![5,6,7,8],
>>     ![9,0,1,2],
>>     ![3,4,5,6]
>> ]
>>
> 
> All this talk makes kinda wish that the ascii tables (and consequently 
> the standard keyboards as well) had one more set of brackets, like the 
> angle brackets for example 
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracket#Angle_brackets_or_chevrons_.E2.8C.A9.C2.A0.E2.8C.AA), 
> used for tuple notation in math. "〈1, 2〉"
> 
> A comparison:
> 
> <1, 2>
> ‹1, 2›
> «1, 2»
> 〈1, 2〉 // Why do these take two spaces?
> 《1, 2》
> 

AFAIK, they take spaces because they are "fullwidth" asian characters. 
I think it comes from most western glyphs being vertical rectangles, and 
most asian glyphs being square-ish.  So they make the characters twice 
as wide :)

As for more brackets: hell yeah.  I think there are three things that 
really limit programming languages: lack of special characters that will 
reliably be on many computers, lack of special characters on our 
keyboards, and programming language's fixation on using special 
characters :P

I think that what would help is adding these features with whatever 
syntax we can muster, and add alises for these using extended characters 
where we can find them.

Maybe if we start supporting more than basic ASCII now, someday we'll 
get better keyboards :)

	-- Daniel