the meaning of rﾕ.......�¾

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Mon, 23 Jul 2012 23:06:45 +1000, Chris Angelico wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 10:55 PM, Roy Smith <roy at panix.com> wrote:
>> Some day, we're going to have programming languages that take advantage
>> of the full unicode character set.  Right now, we're working in ASCII
>> and creating silly digrams/trigrams like r'' for raw strings (and
>> triple-quotes for multi-line strings).  Not to mention <=, >=, ==, !=. 
>> And in languages other than python, things like ->, => (arrows for
>> structure membership), and so on.
> 
> REXX predates Unicode, I think, or at least its widespread adoption, but
> it has a non-ASCII operator:
> 
> http://www.rexswain.com/rexx.html#operators

Only one? Pfft.

What's the difference between >> "Strictly greater than" and < "Greater 
than"?


> But personally, I've always used backslash. It's nothing to do with
> ASCII and everything to do with having it on the keyboard. Before you
> get a language that uses full Unicode, you'll need to have fairly
> generally available keyboards that have those keys.

Or sensible, easy to remember mnemonics for additional characters. Back 
in 1984, Apple Macs made it trivial to enter useful non-ASCII characters 
from the keyboard. E.g.:

Shift-4 gave $
Option-4 gave ¢
Option-c gave ©
Option-r gave ®

Dead-keys made accented characters easy too:

Option-u o gave ö
Option-u e gave ë

etc. And because it was handled by the operating system, *every* 
application supported it, automatically.



-- 
Steven