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

[Bardur Arantsson]

On 2014-04-27 13:45, Rustom Mody wrote:
> 
> 1. I'd like to underscore the 'arbitrary'.  Why is ASCII any less arbitrary
> -- apart from an increasingly irrelevant historical accident -- than
> Arabic, Bengali, Cyrillic, Deseret? [Hint: Whats the A in ASCII?]  By
> contrast math may at least have some pretensions to universality?

The symbols in math are also mostly arbitrary. In effect they should be
considered as "parallel" to the Cyrillic, Latin or Greek alphabets. (Of
course math borrows quite a few symbols from the latter, but I digress.)

> 
> 2. Maybe its a good time now to 'revisit'?  Otherwise like klunky-qwerty,
> it may happen that when the technological justifications for an inefficient
> choice are long gone, social inertia will prevent any useful change.
> 

Billions of people have QWERTY keyboards. Unless you come up with
something *radically* better then they're not going to change. Inertia
has made anything but incremental change impossible. (I note that
Microsoft actually managed to change the QWERTY keyboard incrementally a
decade or two ago by adding the Windows and Context Menu keys. Of course
that didn't removing/change any of the existing functionality of the
basic QWERTY, so it was a relatively small change.)

Using "macros" like "\" (for lambda) or "\sum_{i=0}^{n} i" and having
the editor/IDE display that differently is at least semi-practical for
typing stuff into your computer using QWERTY.

Regards,