On Thursday, March 27, 2014 8:58:51 PM UTC+5:30, Mark H. Harris wrote:
> On 3/25/14 6:58 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> > To quote a great Spaniard:
> > “You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you
> > think it means.”
> In~con~theveable ! My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my
> father, prepare to die...
> > Do you think that the ability to write this would be an improvement?
> > import ⌺
> > ⌚ = ⌺.╩░
> > ⑥ = 5*⌺.⋨⋩
> > ❹ = ⑥ - 1
> > ♅⚕⚛ = [⌺.✱✳**⌺.❇*❹{⠪|⌚.∣} for ⠪ in ⌺.⣚]
> > ⌺.˘˜¨´՛՜(♅⚕⚛)
> Steven, you're killing me here; argument by analogy does not work!
> √ = lambda n: sqrt(n) <===== but this should work...
> In point of fact, it should be built-in ! OK, IMHO.
> > Of course, it's not even necessary to be that exotic. "Any unicode symbol
> > that is not a number"... that means things like these:
> No, any unicode character (except numerals) should be able to begin a
> name identifier. alt-l λ and alt-v √ should be valid first
> character name identifier symbols.
> > There are languages that can allow arbitrary symbols as identifiers, like
> > Lisp and Forth. You will note that they have a certain reputation for
> > being, um, different, and although both went through periods of
> > considerable popularity, both have faded in popularity since.
> Actually, there is a recent resurgence of popularity in both common
> lisp and scheme these days. But, again, that has nothing to do with my
> argument. No modern language should limit the use of certain symbols to
> say, only math √ . The radical symbol is more often than not going
> to be useful only with math (which , by the way is why it should be
> built-in as √ = squre-rooot) but why limit its use elsewhere.
> Whether this can work in python is also beside the point, because
> I'm not demanding anything here either, at this point.
> have a good day!
The problem is that mathematicians invent notations in a completely
laissez-faire manner.
Language implementers having to unrestrainedly keep up would go mad.
And then us vanilla users (aka programmers) would have to deal with maddened
implementers.
Observe:
Good ol infix -- x+y..
prefix (with paren) -- foo(x)
prefix without -- ¬ x
In case you thought alphanumerics had parens -- sin x
Then theres postfix -- n!
Inside fix -- nCr (Or if you prefer ⁿCᵣ ??)
And outside fix -- mod -- |x|
And Ive probably forgotten 2 dozen other common ones
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