On Mon, 23 Jul 2012 08:55:22 -0400, Roy Smith wrote: > Some day, we're going to have programming languages that take advantage > of the full unicode character set.
I don't know about the full Unicode character set, since there are many more than 10000 characters, and few languages require that many distinct tokens. But if you mean a richer character set than mere ASCII, then I agree, provided if by "some day" you mean nearly half a century ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_%28programming_language%29 Sort an array by the length of the word: X[⍋X+.≠' ';] compared to Python: words.sort(key=len) I think that's a clear example of why APL has never quite taken the world by storm. It makes Perl look like human-readable pseudo-code. It isn't necessary to go to APL's extremes to get the power of a richer character set. Back in the 1990s, Apple's Hypertalk language allowed single character synonyms for certain operators, including: ≠ for <> ≤ for <= ≥ for >= ÷ for / √ for sqrt See OpenXION for a modern, non-GUI version: http://www.openxion.org/ Unicode includes a very rich set of operator characters. Assuming the character input problem were solved, it would be awesome to be able to define a rich set of operators beyond the few Python already has. For example, we could use proper ∩ and ∪ operators for set intersection and union, or use chevrons «» as delimiters for types without clashing with lists [], tuples(), sets and dicts {}. And wouldn't you rather see something like "string␊␍" instead of "string\n\r"? I know I would. Of course, the character input problem *is* a genuine problem. Between that and the issue of character display (not all fonts are capable of showing all characters) I wouldn't hold my breath for full Unicode syntax any time soon. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
