Re: ideas for lambda syntax

[Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@...>]

2013/4/11 Henning Diedrich <hd2010@eonblast.com>:

> Algol 68 borrowed from it, and Dirk's sample is a mix of symbols
> and letters, so.

Algol 60 was available in locale-dependent versions: decimal comma
instead of decimal point; keywords in French, German, Italian, even
Chinese.

Strictly speaking the Algol keywords were not part of the alphabet in
which the rest of the code was written. In publications they were
typeset in a different font, not as code highlighting, but to emphasize
that `if` was to be thought of as a symbol on its own, in no way
stopping you from having a program variable called "if".

So using UTF symbols for Lua's keywords is very much in the spirit
of Algol, yes.

> Is the readability better, in everyday use, Dirk? Or did that
> turn out to be a dead end?

I have not used it in earnest.

I already had projects for UTF-8 variable names and for Lua with
Afrikaans keywords, so it was just a simple matter of combining them
to make the symbolic version. The inspiration came from this thread:
think of it as lambda notation taken to its logical extreme.

As for the APL look, the APL385 Unicode font happens to be the system
fixed-width font on my computer, but only ASCII and the APL symbols
themselves look right in it.