Well, I learned x as a multiplication symbol long before I learned either ·
or *, and in many fonts you can barely see the middle dot. Is there a good
reason, we can't just write foo x bar instead of foo * bar? If that's
confusing we could use × instead. No one would ever confuse × and x.
Or for that matter how about (~R∊R∘.×R)/R←1↓⍳R
Seriously: learning that * means multiplication is a very small thing. You
also need to learn what /, // and % do, and the difference between 'and'
and &, and between =, ==, != and /=.
--- Bruce
On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 7:41 PM, Steven D'Aprano
On 13/10/12 07:27, Ram Rachum wrote:
Hi everybody,
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 · ?
t 25 or so years ago, I used to do some programming in Apple's Hypertalk language, which accepted ÷ in place of / for division. The use of two symbols for the same operation didn't cause any problem for users. But then Apple had the advantage that there was a single, system-wide, highly discoverable way of typing non-ASCII characters at the keyboard, and Apple users tended to pride themselves for using them.
I'm not entirely sure about MIDDLE DOT though: especially in small font sizes, it falls foul of the design principle:
"syntax should not look like a speck of dust on Tim's monitor"
(paraphrasing... can anyone locate the original quote?)
and may be too easily confused with FULL STOP. Another problem is that MIDDLE DOT is currently valid in identifiers, so that a·b would count as a single name. Fixing this would require some fairly heavy lifting (a period of deprecation and warnings for any identifier using MIDDLE DOT) before introducing it as an operator. So that's a lot of effort for very little gain.
If I were designing a language from scratch today, with full Unicode support from the beginning, I would support a rich set of operators possibly even including MIDDLE DOT and × MULTIPLICATION SIGN, and leave it up to the user to use them wisely or not at all. But I don't think it would be appropriate for Python to add them, at least not before Python 4: too much effort for too little gain. Maybe in another ten years people will be less resistant to Unicode operators.
[...]
·. People on Linux can type Alt-. .
For what it is worth, I'm using Linux and that does not work for me. I am yet to find a decent method of entering non-ASCII characters.
-- Steven
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