Unicode operators

[Thomas Moran]

I usually lurk here but I wanted to weigh in and say I think this would 
be a great thing. It's depressing to see people worrying about whether 
"." or "!" is more appropriate for a particular operator when the real 
problem is that a different symbol is required. Mathematicians have no 
qualms about using 5 different alphabets and 10 kinds of brackets to 
describe things, and there's no fundamental reason computer programs 
should be any different, except for the fact that entering the symbols 
is awkward. Hopefully that will change. I know there's been at least one 
font in Windows since win2k that has glyphs for the whole Basic 
Multilingual Plane, and there are a lot more that support at least the 
greek alphabet and some extended punctuation. I'm sure the situation is 
similar in Linux.

Since C++ permits unicode identifiers I actually did some experiments a 
few months ago to see what the compiler support was like. The conclusion 
was that only MSVC9 can deal with them, GCC4 and ICC10 (EDG I suppose) 
both choked. You can actually call a variable "αβγ" in VC9 and the 
program compiles. There's unfortunately some confusion over whether 
UTF-8 encoded files should have a BOM - MSVC doesn't parse them properly 
if they don't, but GCC chokes on the BOM. I think this would have to be 
either specified or handled flexibly in D front ends.