On Sat, Oct 29, 2016 at 11:02:36AM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote: > Unfortunately here the most plausible syntax is one > that Guido has said he definitely doesn't like: using '?'. The > alternatives are pretty horrible (a Haskell-like 'maybe' keyword, or > the OPEN SQUARE character used by some logicians in modal logic -- the > problem with the latter is that for many people it may not display at > all with their font configurations, or it may turn into mojibake in > email.
I think you mean WHITE SQUARE? At least, I can not see any "OPEN SQUARE" code point in Unicode, and the character you use below □ is called WHITE SQUARE. > OTOH, that case was an astral character -- after Guido announced his > opposition to '?', the poster used PILE OF POO as the operator. OPEN > SQUARE is in the basic multilingual plane, so probably is OK if the > recipient can handle Unicode. '?' vs. '□': maybe that helps narrow > the choice set? I cannot wait for the day that we can use non-ASCII operators. But I don't think that day has come: it is still too hard for many people (including me) to generate non-ASCII characters at the keyboard, and font support for some of the more useful ones are still inconsistent or lacking. For example, we don't have a good literal for empty sets. How about ∅? Sadly, in my mail client and in the Python REPR, it displays as a "missing glyph" open rectangle. And how would you type it? Ironically, WHITE SQUARE does display, but it took me a while to realise because at first I thought it too was the missing glyph character. And I still have no idea how to type it. Java, I believe, allows you to enter escape sequences in source code, not just in strings. So we could hypothetically allow one of: myobject\N{WHITE SQUARE}attribute myobject\u25a1attribute as a pure-ASCII way of getting myobject□attribute but really, who is going to do that? It is bad enough when strings contain escape sequences, but source code? So even though I *want* to use non-ASCI operators, I have to admit that I *can't* realistically use non-ASCII operators. Not yet. Wishing-that-somebody-can-prove-me-wrong-ly y'rs, -- Steve _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/