On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 4:14 PM, Mark H Harris <harrismh...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 3/25/14 12:08 AM, Chris Angelico wrote: > >> How quickly can you switch, type one letter (to generate one Cyrillic >> character), and switch back? > > > ... very fast. > > Is not this nicer? > >>>> Π = pi >>>> >>>> sin(Π/4) > 0.7071067811865475 >>>> >>>> cos(Π/4) > 0.7071067811865476 >>>> > > my pdeclib constants extension will have alternate spellings for Π and Γ > and Δ and others...
That's good! (Although typing Π quicker than pi is majorly pushing it. I can type pi with two keystrokes. But for longer keywords, that's the way it needs to be.) You can be at the front of the curve - using non-ASCII symbols as identifiers, which a number of languages happily support. Using them as keywords in the language means that it has to be not just you, but the bulk of programmers; otherwise there have to be two ways to do everything, and everyone has to learn both of them. (Once, say, 99% of programmers can happily type all those symbols, the fact that 1% of programmers are using the word "lambda" will just be a matter to be dealt with in legacy code - same as seeing "range" vs "xrange" in Python 2 code. New code needn't concern itself with the difference.) Unfortunately, at the moment it's more like 1% of programmers can easily type those symbols, I would guess. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
