Re: Proposal: allow @, $, !, and ? in Lua identifiers

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

2014-04-28 2:15 GMT+02:00 Andrew Starks <andrew.starks@trms.com>:
>
>
> On Sunday, April 27, 2014, Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> 2014-04-26 13:44 GMT+02:00 David Demelier <demelier.david@gmail.com>:
>>
>> > I also would like to have != instead of ~=. For many reasons, first
>> > because ~= usually mean "approximatively" and because almost all
>> > popular languages use !=. A beginner programmer will confuse when he
>> > will first see ~=. I don't think there are real reasons to keep this
>> > operator :-).
>>
>> Yes, ~= is confusing if your first language was C, but != is ugly.
>> I prefer ≠ which is pretty and not confusing.
>>
>
> No joke: Panorama Sheets (a way better approach to FileMaker than FileMaker)
> had in their user manual to type the ≠ for inequality, as of about 18 months
> ago.
>
> It turned out to be for an older Mac OS 7 version, but I think its funny in
> any decade.

Remember Algol 60? The official language was not machine readable,
representations for various machines being mere implementation details.

We're in the Unicode/UTF8 era now. No reason why we can't have ≤,≥, ←and →
for <=, >=, << and >> too. It's only a tiny patch to llex.c and if you ever need
to send your program to someone else, it's trivial to translate.