On Mon, Oct 31, 2016 at 12:39 AM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore@gmail.com> wrote:
It's certainly not difficult, in principle. I have (had, I lost it in an upgrade recently...) a little AutoHotkey program that interpreted Vim-style digraphs in any application that needed them. But my point was that we don't want to require people to write such custom utilities, just to be able to write Python code. Or is the feeling that it's acceptable to require that?
There's a chicken-and-egg problem. So long as most people don't have tools like that, a language that requires them is going to be very annoying - but so long as no major language uses such characters, there's no reason for developers to set up those kinds of tools. Possibly the best way is a gentle introduction of alternative syntaxes. Since Python currently has no "empty set display" syntax, that seems like a perfect starting point. You can always type "set()", but that involves an actual function call; using ∅ gives a small performance boost, eliminates the risk of shadowing, etc, etc. All minor points, but could be convenient enough. Also, if repr(set()) returns "∅", it'll be easy for anyone to get hold of the character for copy/paste. As of 2016, I think it's not acceptable to *require* this, but it may be time to start making use of it, retaining ASCII-only digraphs and trigraphs, the way C has alternative spelling for braces and so on. Then time passes, most people will be comfortable using the characters themselves, and the digraphs/trigraphs can be deprecated, with new syntax not being given any. Pipe dream? ChrisA