[Haskell-cafe] If you'd design a Haskell-like language, what would you do different?

[Hans Aberg]

On 21 Dec 2011, at 11:09, Jesse Schalken wrote:

> IIRC, Scite's default configuration is with non-monospace font. I actually found it quite appealing, and in fact forgot about it entirely after some usage. It is much easier on the eyes to read. The difference is really whether you care about aligning things mid-line or not, not to mention editor support (i.e. not Vim or other terminal-based editor).

Right, ASCII code that relies on monospace for such midline alignments can be quite unreadable, but otherwise it has nothing really to contribute. Non-monospace might in fact be more readable, taking away the fact that it may take some time to get used to it, since monospace has been used so much.

For such alignments, one would either to write to code so it does not depend on it, or find some other means to do it.

Hans

> On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 8:58 PM, Hans Aberg <haberg-1 at telia.com> wrote:
> On 21 Dec 2011, at 04:27, Ashok Gautham wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 11:17:32PM +0100, Hans Aberg wrote:
> >> The monospace characters U+1D670-1D6A3 might be used for keywords. Font:
> >>  http://www.stixfonts.org/
> >
> > I feel that monospace fonts should be used for all of programming. A
> > language could use Unicode symbols, but if it enforces typography, it
> > is destined to win an award for being really unusable
> 
> I have some books from the 1980s which does not use monospace; it seems to be a later movement. Using it for all symbols would be awkward.
> 
> Hans