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Rust, Macros, λ-calculus/Church numerals, oh my

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Re: Rust, Macros, λ-calculus/Church numerals, oh my

#81
post #2

While it's definitely cute and amusing, this is exactly why languages that specify their source code in non-ascii encodings are a bad idea. Fully 92.6% of working programmers have no idea how to produce a λ or γ on their input device of choice. Maybe a third of those could eventually find it with a character picker tool. Java started this (in the unicode era anyway -- yeah yeah, APL). The community quite sanely rejec…

I see no problem with this outside of the set of core Rust technologies. If you were to require the average developer to type mathematic symbols it would be a barrier. However, libraries specifically targeting mathematicians would obviously not have that same barrier. Making mathematical equations clearer to read and easier to work with within that domain may certainly be worth using syntactic tricks and non-ASCII symbols.

I've seen plenty of code bases which are not in English, since the developers did not have English as their first language. This is usually a well-contemplated decision - for instance, the Ruby language source code is specifically written so that you don't require knowledge of Japanese to understand the core libraries or the C reference implementation.

Re: Rust, Macros, λ-calculus/Church numerals, oh my

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fully 92.6% of working programmers have no idea how to produce a λ or γ on their input device of choice I can imagine a simple remedy for this. Have the IDE suggest symbol replacements whenever the use types the name of the symbol. 'lambda' causes λ to be suggested.

That is, if they know that “λ” is “lambda”, which honestly might not extend to many of the Greek letters, to say nothing of Unicode.

Well, just add a hint when hovering on the symbol. I think we to make better use of our tools.
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