Re: about some potentially interesting unicode operators

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:

On Wed, 28 Aug 2024 12:46:55 -0700, Keith Thompson wrote:

A problem with using non-ASCII Unicode characters as operator names is
that they can be difficult to type -- and the way you type them is
inconsistent across systems.

>
The best way is the Compose key available on *nix systems. This is the
closest to a mnemonic-based system that reduces the burden on your memory.
>
<https://wiki.wlug.org.nz/ComposeKey>

There is no "Compose" key on the keyboard I'm using to type this.
There is a key labeled "Alt Gr", but it doesn't appear to behave in
any consistent or useful way.  (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 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.)

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

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.)

--
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith) Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com
void Void(void) { Void(); } /* The recursive call of the void */