[Python-ideas] Infix functions

[Paul Moore]

On 23 February 2014 07:17, Bruce Leban <bruce at leapyear.org> wrote:
> On the other hand, I haven't seen any replies from people saying they can't
> read these characters. So the real issue might be the inconvenience of
> typing. I wonder if the people who would use them are going to be typing
> them anyway in other contexts.

Some things that immediately strike me:

1. The Windows console is not Unicode-friendly and displaying
non-ASCII source code is still problematic.
2. Encoding detection is *not* a solved problem, and it's certainly
not universally implemented in editors. It may look like it on Unix
systems where the system encoding is generally UTF8 these days, but on
Windows the system codepage is typically a 256-character one and
working with anything different (which you'd need to for this
proposal) means remembering to specify explicit encodings quite
frequently.
3. Tools like grep may or may not work with extended characters - they
don't on Windows, but I don't know how much of the fault for that lies
with the Windows console. From what I've seen of the grep sources they
might but they rely on char *argv which implies that the C runtime
support for setting up argv might be relevant here (and on Windows
that does *not* handle extended characters)

The general theme here is obviously "Windows" so maybe that's really
what I'm saying. But it does mean that Andrew Barnert's comment "in
the far off day that Python and source editors could handle Unicode.
And we have pretty much reached that day." may not be true unless
you're willing to ignore Windows users.

Paul