[Haskell-cafe] Language simplicity

[Evan Laforge]

Wow, that's kind of cute:

{-# LANGUAGE UnicodeSyntax #-}
(＊) = (*)
(／) = (/)
公式 高 中 低=高＊中＊低／整數
整數 = 123

Oddly, if I change the order of these definitions I get syntax errors.
 Very mysterious.  Nice how it knows that ＊ is a symbol, but I'm not
sure how I'm supposed to name a type.  It certainly spells the end of
of camelCase arguments though, and can take single-character variable
names to dizzying new heights :)

I suppose number literals can't be overridden though.  Not to mention ＝ and （）.

> It's not just one's editor (I use emacs, and it's actually not that
> hard to type a decent subset of interesting Unicode characters in
> emacs with the tex input mode), but readability.  The ASCII characters
> are universal and easily recognized (assuming you have a decent
> monochrome font); having to notice potentially significant differences
> involving diacritics alone (not to mention all the various
> mathematical symbols) in identifiers would drive me mad.  It's the
> same reason we try to limit lines of code to ~80 characters -- our
> editors are *capable* of more, sure, but are we?

Unicode identifiers are fun but this is a good point.  The line has to
be somewhere, so it might as well be in the historical position unless
there are widely agreed on benefits to moving it.

On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 10:45 PM, Colin Paul Adams
<colin at colina.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> My wife is Chinese. When she was learning pinyin as a child, she
> asked her father for help with some homework. He replied that he didn't
> understand them.

But that's all kind of beside the point because you already need to
learn quite a bit of specialized knowledge to be writing in haskell in
the first place.  It's real hard to get to that stage without already
recognizing ascii.

If the problem was just pinyin and not latin letters in general, then
most Taiwanese wouldn't understand it either.