Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

queue.acm.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 291 posts

Re: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

#41

Post by scrollaway »

sharikous wrote: post #21
eterevsky wrote: post #16

The best thing about using only ASCII for the main syntax is that everyone can type it with their keyboard. I think the recent fad of supporting Unicode identifiers is misguided. Of course, Unicode should be permitted in string literals, but not in the code itself. *Also I don't think Go is better than modern C++, though it might be better than C++99 which was the main standard when the article was written.

Having to do math and physics heavy work, I very much support the "fad" of having Unicode literals. "omega_0" is much worse than "ω_0" especially if you have tons of these variables. If you don't do math it's difficult to understand, but try writing without the alphabet and expressing the same concepts. Possible but clunky

A variable named ω is no better than a list named l. Both are bad. Be explicit. Terse, but explicit.

Re: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

#42

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

A programming language designed by a Mac user might make use of the symbols §, ±, ≤ and ≥, among others. I think the tyranny of ASCII is really the tyranny of the tragically poor support for entering characters beyond a small national-language set on the commonly-used OSes, especially Windows. (macOS is significantly better here but no utopia.) Windows-1252, MacRoman and so on may not be the standard character sets any more, but you wouldn't know it from what the OSes make easy to type!

Re: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

#43

Post by scrollaway »

nightfly wrote: post #4

If I wanna use something like a ™ I have to google how to enter it, or just google and copy the character. I don't want any extra glyphs in my code until it's just as easy to enter (at close to full speed) as the glyphs I already have access to.

I haven't advertised this very much but years ago I wrote my own keyboard layout because things like this annoyed me. I came from an AZERTY background and wanted the m key moved in qwerty, as well as various other adjustments for common symbols and punctuation, especially for programming.

Anyway, a year or so ago i contributed it back to xkeyboard. On Linux you can find it in English (US) variants, Drix.

https://cgit.freedesktop.org/xkeyboard-config/tree/symbols/u...

The ™ symbol is AltGR+T. × is AltGR+x.

Re: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

#44

Post by scrollaway »

ht_th wrote: post #14
nightfly wrote: post #4

If I wanna use something like a ™ I have to google how to enter it, or just google and copy the character. I don't want any extra glyphs in my code until it's just as easy to enter (at close to full speed) as the glyphs I already have access to.

Last year, when I suddenly had to teach symbol-heavy stuff over the internet, I put together a tool for this because my handwriting is just too bad with a mouse or even a tablet. I wanted to be able to "live" calculate with symbols while I talked over it with my students. I called this tool √𝚎𝚍, the rich Unicode text editing suite (RUTED, pronounced ˈruːtɪd) and I use it in vim: https://gitlab.com/ruted/ruted-vim .…

I'm surprised you didn't go the xcompose route! Was this an explicit choice or just didn't know about it?

Re: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

#45

Post by eterevsky »

benjaminjosephw wrote: post #34
eterevsky wrote: post #16

The best thing about using only ASCII for the main syntax is that everyone can type it with their keyboard. I think the recent fad of supporting Unicode identifiers is misguided. Of course, Unicode should be permitted in string literals, but not in the code itself. *Also I don't think Go is better than modern C++, though it might be better than C++99 which was the main standard when the article was written.

But "everyone" doesn't have the same keyboard nor does everyone speak the same language. ASCII is not a universal character set and treating it as such is nothing short of cultural imperialism: "If it's good enough for us, it's good enough for everyone". Artificial limits on language and characters sets might sound simple to you but it introduces a lot of complexity for others. Unicode code solves that problem with n…

English is not my first language and my native language doesn't use Latin script, still all the keyboards that I ever saw supported entering ASCII characters. As far as I know all the keyboards that are in active use support English layout.

We shouldn't dismiss this as "cultural imperialism". Instead we should use this to our advantage. Currently source code written in China or in Russia can be read by developers in India or in the US. This is amazing. Let's not forsake it!

Re: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

#46

Post by nanis »

This really made me smile:

> Programmers are a picky bunch when it comes to syntax, and it is a sobering thought that one of the most rapidly adopted programming languages of all time, Perl, barely had one for the longest time. The funny thing is, what syntax designers are really fighting about is not so much the proper and best syntax for the expression of ideas in a machine-understandable programming language as it is the proper and most efficient use of the ASCII table real estate.

Re: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

#47

Post by idle_zealot »

ht_th wrote: post #14
nightfly wrote: post #4

If I wanna use something like a ™ I have to google how to enter it, or just google and copy the character. I don't want any extra glyphs in my code until it's just as easy to enter (at close to full speed) as the glyphs I already have access to.

Last year, when I suddenly had to teach symbol-heavy stuff over the internet, I put together a tool for this because my handwriting is just too bad with a mouse or even a tablet. I wanted to be able to "live" calculate with symbols while I talked over it with my students. I called this tool √𝚎𝚍, the rich Unicode text editing suite (RUTED, pronounced ˈruːtɪd) and I use it in vim: https://gitlab.com/ruted/ruted-vim .…

You could accomplish this globally with a Composefile on Linux, AutoHotKey script on Windows, or custom abbreviations on Mac.

Re: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

#48

Post by eterevsky »

sharikous wrote: post #21
eterevsky wrote: post #16

The best thing about using only ASCII for the main syntax is that everyone can type it with their keyboard. I think the recent fad of supporting Unicode identifiers is misguided. Of course, Unicode should be permitted in string literals, but not in the code itself. *Also I don't think Go is better than modern C++, though it might be better than C++99 which was the main standard when the article was written.

Having to do math and physics heavy work, I very much support the "fad" of having Unicode literals. "omega_0" is much worse than "ω_0" especially if you have tons of these variables. If you don't do math it's difficult to understand, but try writing without the alphabet and expressing the same concepts. Possible but clunky

I have a degree in math and I disagree with this. ω_0 definitely looks better than omega_0, but it is much harder to enter unless you have a special keyboard setup.

Suppose you write a function that uses a variable ω_0, and somebody else wants to change it. Unless they have the same keyboard setup as you, they will have to just copy-past it everywhere. And what if you have several variable with special names?

Re: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

#49

Post by eterevsky »

zabzonk wrote: post #22
eterevsky wrote: post #16

The best thing about using only ASCII for the main syntax is that everyone can type it with their keyboard. I think the recent fad of supporting Unicode identifiers is misguided. Of course, Unicode should be permitted in string literals, but not in the code itself. *Also I don't think Go is better than modern C++, though it might be better than C++99 which was the main standard when the article was written.

Slight typo: It's C++98.

Thanks! I confused it with C99.

Re: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

#50

Post by [deleted] »

doctor_eval wrote: post #36
benjaminjosephw wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But "everyone" doesn't have the same keyboard nor does everyone speak the same language. ASCII is not a universal character set and treating it as such is nothing short of cultural imperialism: "If it's good enough for us, it's good enough for everyone". Artificial limits on language and characters sets might sound simple to you but it introduces a lot of complexity for others. Unicode code solves that problem with n…

Not sure why you're downvoted; it's simply true that ASCII is not universal. The "A" in ASCII stands for American. I am a monolingual English speaker but I think I should be able to write ÷, ≤ and ≥ in my Go code, and I think I should be able to do maths using π.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN