On Thu, Apr 14, 2011 at 2:54 AM, Martin Baker wrote: > > I keep finding notation that would be better implemented using unicode > (for example λ-calculus) and although I can implement on my local machine > I have refraied from doing so in case the code is useful to others without > unicode support. >
I am quite curious about how many people are "running without Unicode support". In my case it seems that there has been considerable Unicode support available on my computers and in various packages that I use without me even knowing it. I have a feeling that maybe this is a general problem and that conservative attitudes and lack of education on this issue has resulted in a slow acceptance rate. Probably with a little forethought is would be possible to support users without Unicode support by providing alternate (long and awkward) names for the symbols and symbol combinations that you use. > I think the benifits you explain so well are so strong that its worth > sacrificing some backwards compatibilty. > > my 2¢ > Thanks. It's taken me some time to reach this same conclusion. One thing that I didn't mention yet was one thing that bothers me quite often: an insufficient number of suitable infix symbols. The syntax of these symbols is at least partly "hardwired" into FriCAS and are not easy to change. But I suspect that adding new symbols to the existing set might not be so hard. In FriCAS, for the most part there is only one symbol available for multiplication. Because of polymorphism and overloading this is not quite so much a problem as it could be. But still we do not have enough symbols even to write expressions in linear algebra, for example, that one would find in elementary text books. Unicode could help this situation a lot. There are a lot of symbols in Unicode whose common use in mathematics is to denote an infix operator. I think they should be recognized by FriCAS as such. Regards, Bill Page. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "FriCAS - computer algebra system" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/fricas-devel?hl=en.
