Non-ASCII languages (was: Re: style question)

[Jorgen Grahn]

On Thu, 29 Jun 2006 23:19:34 +0200, Fredrik Lundh <fredrik at pythonware.com> wrote:
> Jorgen Grahn wrote:
...
>> (I like well-typeset code in print though. Bjarne Stroustrup uses an elegant
>> system for C++ code, where identifiers and strings are in Times italic,
>> operators in Courier, and so on.)
>
> the idea of printing everything in courier (or some other monospace 
> font) is a rather new idea; if you read seventies stuff, the program 
> code is often as carefully designed as the rest of the document.

Possibly true, and definitely for Knuth.  But WYSIWYG was unknown at the
time; these people all programmed using fixed-width fonts, on teletypes or
character-mapped terminals. Hell, even full-screen editors were new and
controversial until the late 1970s!

Program editing and displaying/typesetting can be treated as separate from
each other. Personally, I think they /should/ be -- I prefer troff or LaTeX
to MS Word, after all.

> (for an indication that we might be moving back to nicely rendered code, 
> see Sun's new Fortress language, which provides extraordinarily detailed 
> control over how identifiers are rendered, including extensive support 
> for Unicode and math notation.  it also mandates the use of proportional 
> fonts for things like identifiers and comments...)

And Sun apparently think they should not be separate.
To me, it looks like they are planning for this language to fail.

If I wanted to try out this language, I would have to give up most of my
existing toolbox -- which works flawlessly with everything from TI assembly
to Python. And what would people discuss on comp.lang.fortress? Google
destroys Python code well enough ...

/Jorgen

-- 
  // Jorgen Grahn <grahn@        Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu
\X/     snipabacken.dyndns.org>  R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!