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

[Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH]

On 2008 May 14, at 22:07, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:

> 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.)

Hm.  Newer Unicode standard than the version supported by OSX and  
GNOME, I take it?  That's not so helpful if nobody actually supports  
the characters in question.  (My Mac claims 166CC is in an unassigned  
area, and no supplied font has the others.  It does at least  
acknowledge that the others should exist and are "letters".)

Hm, U+2144 as an approximation?

I still suspect it would not be outside the pale to make λ a keyword.   
We already have several, after all.

> 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.


:)

-- 
brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery at kf8nh.com
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery at ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university    KF8NH