On Aug 28, 2017, at 7:57 PM, John Pratt via swift-evolution
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> I sent a postal envelope to the Swift team with an article I wrote, arguing
> that
> symbols and graphics would push the programming language forward.
>
> Wouldn’t it be nice to have an actual multiplication matrix broken out into
> code,
> instead of typing, “matrix()”? It seems to me Swift has the chance to do
> that.
>
> Also: why does "<==" still reside in code as "less than or equal to” when
> there is a unicode equivalent that looks neat?
>
> Why can’t the square of x have a superscript of 2 instead of having
> “pow(x,2)?
> I think this would make programming much easier to deal with.
>
> I expound on this issue in my article:
>
> http://www.noctivagous.com/nct_graphics_symbols_prglngs_draft2-3-12.pdf
> <http://www.noctivagous.com/nct_graphics_symbols_prglngs_draft2-3-12.pdf>
>
> Thank you for reading.
I whole-heartedly agree with the sentiment, but I think you're approaching this
from the wrong direction... Unicode isn't used much because there's no simple,
easy, and universal way to input unicode characters. Personally, I use a custom
keyboard layout with tons of stuff mapped to ctrl- and alt-keys, but that
breaks things like, say, Terminal.app, because ctrl-d prints ∂ instead of
sending the control character (so I switch back to a keyboard layout without
the control keys mapped, which is annoying). We need to solve the general
unicode input problem before we can start seriously pushing for its use to be
required, and that's far outside of Swift's scope.
As far as formatting matrices "correctly" (and I also wish they could be
displayed the way you demonstrated in your write-up), I think that'd be more a
feature of some sort of custom display layer in Xcode than of macOS's or
Linux's text system. Maybe it'd fit in with some other OS's type system, but
"typewriter text" is too ingrained into the text systems of Windows, macOS, and
Linux (and every other OS I can think of) for "pretty print" matrices to work
across all text-based applications (which is what I think it'd take to catch
on).
- Dave Sweeris
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