[Haskell-cafe] Records (was Re: [Haskell] Improvements to GHC)

[Glynn Clements]

Sebastian Sylvan wrote:

> > > How about (¤)? It looks like a ring to me, I'm not sure where that's
> > > located on a EN keyboard, but it's not terribly inconvenient on my SE
> > > keyboard. f ¤ g looks better than "f . g" for function composition, if
> > > you ask me.
> > >
> > That symbol actually does look better, but isn't on any English
> > keyboards to the best of my knowledge. I can get it in my setup with
> > <compose-key> o x, but not many people have a compose key assigned.
> > Also, this may just be a bug, but currently, ghc gives a lexical error
> > if I try to use that symbol anywhere, probably just since it's not an
> > ASCII character.
> 
> Hmm. On my keyboard it's Shift+4. Strange that it's not available on
> other keyboards. As far as I know that symbol means nothing
> particularly "swedish". In fact, I have no idea what it means at all
> =)

It's a generic currency symbol (the X11 keysym is XK_currency). It
doesn't exist on a UK keyboard (where Shift-4 is the dollar sign).

In any case, using non-ASCII characters gives rise to encoding issues
(e.g. you have to be able to edit UTF-8 files).

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn at gclements.plus.com>