[Haskell-cafe] Richer (than ascii) notation for haskell source?

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

On 15 May 2008, at 7:19 am, Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:
> Unfortunately, while I thought there was a distinct lambda sign that  
> wasn't the lowercase Greek letter, there isn't.  (That said, I don't  
> see why it couldn't be a keyword.  You'd need a space after it.)

There are three lambda letters: lower and upper case Greek, and  
Ugaritic (U+1038D).
But there are also mathematical symbols:

	U+166CC		mathematical bold small lamda (sic.)
	U+1D706		mathematical italic small lamda (sic.)
	U+1D740		mathematical bold italic small lamda (sic.)
	U+1D77A		mathematical sans-serif bold small lamda (sic.)
	U+1D7B4		mathematical sans-serif bold italic small lamda (sic.)

These things are visually letters, but as mathematical symbols
they should not combine into words.  Except that to my surprise, nay,  
to my
utter astonishment, the Unicode 5.1 character data base classifies  
them as
letters just like the letter "e".

At least to give editors a fighting chance of matching their concept  
of a
"word" with Haskell tokens, it might be better to use nabla instead of
lambda.  Other old APL fans may understand why (:-).  Alternatively,  
didn't
Church really want to use a character rather like a down tack, and  
have to
squish it to get a letter his printer was happy with?  Nah, nabla for  
me.

--
"I don't want to discuss evidence." -- Richard Dawkins, in an
interview with Rupert Sheldrake.  (Fortean times 232, p55.)