On 15 Mar 2011 17:13, "Cédric Beust ♔" <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 8:11 AM, Eric Jablow <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mar 14, 4:20 pm, Cédric Beust ♔ <[email protected]> wrote:
>> > 2011/3/14 Alexey Zinger <[email protected]>
>> >
>>
>> > I certainly agree that a few people in our community have a strange
sense of
>> > readability, such as people who think that ":->>" is a fine name for a
>> > method <http://twitter.com/#!/psnively/status/47304518869848065> (here
is my
>> > original tweet <http://twitter.com/#!/cbeust/status/47151793817403392>)
:-)
>> >
>>
>> I do wish that Java would allow Unicode equivalents for certain
>> operators.  In a UTF-8 source code file, if (a ≤ b) seems preferable to
if (a <= b).
>
>
> Well, that's a slightly different debate and I'm feeling a bit more open
to that idea. I think it's important for identifiers to contain a minimum
number of English words so that you can actually understand and pronounce
that name out loud, but non alphabetical characters should make up a very
tiny proportion of such names. I can't really come up with a good example
off the top of my head, though (e.g. "convertToDegrees()" ->
"convertTo°()").
>

There's no clear answer here, API's evolve in much the same fashion as
spoken language, with commonly used terms being abbreviated. This is also
domain specific, so >>= is perfectly acceptable in Haskell, where it
represents a core pattern used in that language.

I reckon it's okay for a concept to have an operator so long as it's widely
enough used, and has a pronouncable alternative.

Such as in Cédric's example, where I would read the -> operator as "maps to"

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> Cédric
>
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