UTF-8 Unicode operators vs digraphs

[Dlighted]

On Wednesday, 12 August 2026 at 02:12:31 UTC, user1234 wrote:
> On Tuesday, 11 August 2026 at 17:34:00 UTC, Dlighted wrote:
>> [...]
>> I think especially digraphs like >= <= != are a relict of the 
>> past.
>> They are stand-ins for ≥ ≤ ≠ just like C has for many other 
>> now common symbols. I'm supposed to do mental gymnastics and 
>> visually overlap the symbols to see the actual symbol.
>
> This part of the problem is solved if you use a programming 
> font with ligatures (FiraCode, JetBrainsMono, etc.).

That doesn't actually work across github or similar, terminal 
(git) and text editor. I bet a lot of older text editors and 
terminals don't support ligatures in the first place. Simply 
using the right symbol will always display right.

The ligatures for && and || look almost the same as no ligatures 
in Fira Code and Jetbrains Mono. I doubt most developers use 
these fonts anyway. That's not drastically going to improve 
readability.

Your reasoning can be used to justify anything blocking progress. 
HTML entities for every non-ascii character in HTML for example.