[Python-ideas] Is there a good reason to use * for multiplication?

[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.


<aside>
In college we dropped the · and just wrote stuff like:

(x + z)(x - y)

but we can't do that in Python because they are function calls.
</aside>


In short, I don't see it happening.

~Ethan~