[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Paul Johnson) writes: > > > More and more conversations like this, (and how many have we seen here > > > already?) about characters sets, encodings, mail quoting issues, in > > > fact, anything other than Perl, will be rife on every Perl-related > > > mailing list if we persist with this idiotic idea of having Unicode > > > operators. > > I live in Switzerland and regularly deal with three languages which have > various diacritics and special characters. Personally, I would be very > happy with Unicode operators, but I fear that Simon's prediction would > be accurate and I would much rather spend my time evangelising the > virtues of Perl 6 as a language than trying to fathom or explain the > incantations required to program on various platforms with a backdrop of > unfamiliar, buggy or non-existent Unicode support.
On the other hand, maybe I'm being as shortsighted as Thomas J Watson [1] and that once the various operating systems do get their Unicode support together and we see the introduction of the 50,000 key keyboard, then Perl 6's Unicode operators will be a real boon. After all, it worked for APL and for the MIT space-cadet keyboards, so... I dunno. I just think that right now, it's a crazy idea. And if we have user-definable operators *anyway*, it's a doubly crazy idea. Just make everything be user-definable multimethods. In fact, that's another reason for not using . for the bit ops: I'd like to be able to see $a .+ $b as being equivalent to $a.+($b) That is, calling the + method on $a. This way you also get to choose which of the multimethods gets applied for free... [1] "I think there's a world market for about five computers." -- I hooked up my accelerator pedal in my car to my brake lights. I hit the gas, people behind me stop, and I'm gone. -- Steven Wright
