[Haskell-cafe] Unicode Haskell source -- Yippie!

[Chris Warburton]

Rustom Mody <rustompmody at gmail.com> writes:

> As for APL, it failed for various reasons eg
> - mixing up assembly language (straight line code with gotos) with
> functional idioms
> - the character set was a major hurdle in the 60s. Thats not an issue today
> when most OSes/editors are unicode compliant

I know it's bikeshedding, but I think Agda and Idris are more relevant
to Haskell than APL, since their semantics are closer (and they're both
implemented in Haskell).

Agda makes extensive (ab)use of Unicode identifiers,
eg. https://github.com/agda/agda-stdlib/blob/master/src/Algebra.agda

Idris specifically avoids Unicode identifiers, for reasons outlined at
https://github.com/idris-lang/Idris-dev/wiki/Unofficial-FAQ

Personally I prefer working in Idris to Agda, since the Unicode puts me
off. I usually resort to copy/pasting symbols, which is tedious compared
to typing names.

Cheers,
Chris