Re: about some potentially interesting unicode operators

On 29.08.2024 02:04, Keith Thompson wrote:

 
There is no "Compose" key on the keyboard I'm using to type this.

Neither on mine. (I recall it from a friend's old IBM computer.
I think it was close to the separate number-block.)

There is a key labeled "Alt Gr", but it doesn't appear to behave in
any consistent or useful way.

"Alt Gr" is different. It's used on my keyboards to have access
to a third layer of characters (e.g. € sign or various European
languages' characters).

I have two keyboards connected to my Linux computer, one with US
layout and one with DE layout, both having the "Alt GR" key but
only the DE keyboard seems to produce characters with that key.

(I'm using a Windows laptop; "Alt Gr"
doesn't appear to do anything useful even in Windows PowerShell.)
 
If there's an easy way to type non-ASCII characters like '·' that
works across different systems, including all the various terminal
emulators used on Windows and Linux (as well as MacOS, but I don't
happen to use it), I'd love to know about it.

I don't think there can be a portable or consistent way to create
that character. Incidentally (I just tried a few keys) I can get
the '·' by typing "Alt GR" and ',' (on my DE keyboard). But that
was of course coincidence that this character had been chosen to
be displayed with the "Alt Gr" key since there's only a limited
set of keys for additional characters physically available.

(I obtained that
'·' character by opening vim, entering the Ctrl-K . M digraph,
and copy-and-pasting into this window -- not something I'd be
willing to do every time I want to type an operator symbol.)

Understandably.

 
People who use non-English languages typically have keyboards with
accented letters and so forth.

Correct.

 

There's nothing wrong with using identifiers as operator names.
C already does this with "sizeof" et al.

>
Except they add to your list of reserved words.

 
That's not much of a problem if they're designed into the language from
the beginning.  (I'm not suggesting adding new keyword operator symbols
to C -- though C has been acquiring new keywords, including alignof
which is an operator and typeof which resembles one.)

Yes. - In Algol 68 you have separate name-spaces for identifiers.
User-defined operators are in the same name-space as the language
keywords and standard operators. The separation of name-spaces is
probably the reason why it's not considered that bad to have a lot
of keywords. C and C++ designers were much more concerned.

Janis