[Python-ideas] Non-ASCII in Python syntax? [was: Null coalescing operator]

[Paul Moore]

On 30 October 2016 at 12:31, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 30, 2016 at 11:22 PM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
>> In mentioning emoji, my main point was that "average computer users"
>> are more and more likely to want to use emoji in general applications
>> (emails, web applications, even documents) - and if a sufficiently
>> general solution for that problem is found, it may provide a solution
>> for the general character-entry case.
>
> Before Unicode emoji were prevalent, ASCII emoticons dominated, and
> it's not uncommon for multi-character sequences to be automatically
> transformed into their corresponding emoji. It isn't hard to set
> something up that does these kinds of transformations for other
> Unicode characters - use trigraphs for clarity, and type "/:0" to
> produce "∅". Or whatever's comfortable for you. Maybe rig it on
> Ctrl-Alt-0, if you prefer shift-key sequences.

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?

Paul