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

[Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH]

On 2008 May 15, at 4:33, Yitzchak Gale wrote:
> Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:
>>>> Come to think of it, if you're after math notation, enough Greek
>>>> letters are used as symbols that it might be necessary to just
>>>> exclude them from use as letters.
>
> Yitz Gale wrote:
>>> While I have not yet noticed anyone from Greece on this list,
>>> I don't think it would be appropriate for us to discriminate
>>> against Greek speakers as a built-in feature of Haskell.
>
> Achim Schneider wrote:
>> /me shudders and tries not to remember those occasions when he read  
>> code
>> written in french.
>
> He he, yes. I've seen C++ written in transliterated Russian, too.
> Very amusing - as long as I'm not the one who has to debug it.

True --- as one of the people who generally gets to fire-test heimdal (http://h5l.org 
) and feed back changes, it's always fun to debug those parts where  
variable names and comments are in Svensk.

>> Code should be written completely in English, for practical reasons.
>
> Yes, of course, that's the standard today for software development.
> But I'm just saying that it would not be a good idea to
> hard-wire that policy into our language syntax.

Suddenly I'm thinking of Lingua::Romana::Perligata....

> I always find my thumb hovering indecisively over the space bar
> when I type a backslash "lambda" in Haskell.

Come to think of it, I find myself inserting spaces anyway because of  
emacs' tendency to use backslash as an escape character (and because  
I'm so used to it being an escaper instead of an active character in  
its own right).

-- 
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