Re: Syntactic sugar for function parameters

[David Given <dg@...>]

Miles Bader wrote:
[...]
> Hmmm, my mail-reader misses one: "HORIZONTAL SCAN LINE-1" (between the
> two 1s)...  I knew APL used all the greek letters and lots of weird
> overstruck stuff, but ... HORIZONTAL SCAN LINE-1?!?

Well, when I was transcribing the program I had a fair amount of trouble
finding which characters to use. That character was the closest I could find.
(I also suspect that I should be using ⦵ instead of ⊝.) Which brings us to
another problem about using exotic Unicode in programs --- there are rather a
lot of duplicated symbols. Take a look at my signature; the email address is
written in full-width Japanese script, which means it's not ASCII and web
robots won't see it.

Using Unicode, I'd be able to have distinct variables called ⃝, ○, ◯, ⚪, ⚬, ❍,
￮, 𐩒, , , O, , , , ０, Ｏ, Ο, ο, , , o, , , ｏ... and I now can't
remember whether I included O and o in that list! (Some of those do come out
of the Private Use section, so they probably shouldn't count as they might not
render the same on your machine, but it's still an impressive list.)

(I will also point out that I do think that Lua should support all this stuff
--- it would be really nice to allow Chinese and Japanese programmers to use
function names and variables in their own languages, for example --- but the
associated problems are definitely non-trivial.)

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