On 12Oct2012 13:27, Ram Rachum ram.rachum@gmail.com wrote: | Today a funny thought occurred to me. Ever since I've learned to program | when I was a child, I've taken for granted that when programming, the sign | used for multiplication is *. But now that I think about it, why? Now that | we have Unicode, why not use ยท ?
Because it looks astonishingly like ".". Reason enough to avoid it altogether, for any purpose, in a language that uses "." quite a like, as Python does.
A big -100 from me.
Besides, "*" works well and has a long history as multiplication in many languages. This isn't broken.
As a child, I was taught "x" (that's intened as a small cross diagonally oriented, not the letter I've used here) for multiplication. Let's support that too! It also looks like another character (specifically, a lot like the letter "x").
Seriously, I think this is a bad idea on a readability/usability basis, and an unnecessary idea from a functional point of view - it adds noting not already there and mucks with the "one obvious way to do it" notion into the bargain.
Cheers,