13 Oct
2012
13 Oct
'12
12:26 a.m.
On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 4:37 PM, Ethan Furman
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 · ?
Because it is too easy to confuse · with .
Because it is not solving a problem.
Because it would still take work, and then easily cause confusion.
Because, unlike *, it's a valid character in identifiers. Which means allowing it either breaks backwards compatibility or makes for some very confusing usage conventions.