151–160 of 291 posts
The Unison language stores code as a syntax tree and they're planning to support multiple alternative syntaxes for the language. https://www.unisonweb.org Unison’s core idea is that code is immutable and identified by its content. This lets us reimagine many aspects of how a programming language works. We simplify codebase management — Unison has no builds, no dependency conflicts, and renaming things is trivial. Som…
The irony here is that Python does have an open-scope delimiter. It is the colon. What it lacks is a close-scope delimiter. But you can hack one using the PASS statement and emacs auto-indent, and in my code I do this so that my Python code always auto-indents correctly. Without this you cannot reliably cut-and-paste Python code because you can't count on leading white space being correctly preserved.
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I disagree. Instead of writing one letter variable names, one could do the hard work of naming things properly, which software developers often do. Instead of going with one letter or the name of that letter as variable name, which tells your fellow non-mathematicians exactly nothing about what it contains, one could put in the effort and make the code readable. Using these one letter variables forces the reader of t…
Mathematicians have been thinking about nomenclature for a long time - certain fields have very specific usage of symbols. I see no evil in using these well-known one-letter variables in these rare/small parts of functions.
>> For some reason computer people are so conservative [...] Well, one of the underlying reasons for the lack of imagination might be... keyboards . If keyboard keys were small e-ink displays, easily configurable and accessible by programs, programmers would have come up with a lot of interesting stuff already. We do it with function icons in regular interfaces. If we could intergrate with keyboards, we'd definitely…
The touchbar on my M1 Macbook Pro does this. It makes using Emojis a lot easier. I incorporate emojis into my languages more and more nowadays.
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 a…
Character inputs will always differ between platforms and the most common denominator will always end up being popular for text input. Most of the world is on Windows, so most of the world will use Windows text input. From that input, a limited subset of characters will be used for common expressions, because many people simply don't know they can write the ¬ symbol. Does it make sense to use that instead of the excl…
That's not really an Apple thing so much as a non-US thing. The standard PC UK layout also has a £ in that position.
> I personally prefer US International over Apple's layout.
Which Apple layout? Apple has its own US English, International English and British English layouts, as well as myriad other languages.
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No, because the mangled names still depend on the names ...
Not sure I get the distinction. Hashes "depend" on the name as well. You perhaps can't (easily) unmangle, but it's still a derivation.
It's actually quite a clever idea.
> And need I remind anybody that you cannot buy a monochrome screen anymore? Syntax-coloring editors are the default. Why not make color part of the syntax? Why not tell the compiler about protected code regions by putting them on a framed light gray background? Or provide hints about likely and unlikely code paths with a green or red background tint? I'm colorblind, please never do that. Syntax highlighting is fine…
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Hmm, Julia begs to differ, with most editors replacing lambda with the lambda Unicode symbol for example.
Using ligatures (of sort) in presenting code doesn't mean the code itself is not ASCII. Plus, let's see mainstream languages adopt this, I doubt they will. Languages do stupid things all the time.
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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 disagree. Instead of writing one letter variable names, one could do the hard work of naming things properly, which software developers often do. Instead of going with one letter or the name of that letter as variable name, which tells your fellow non-mathematicians exactly nothing about what it contains, one could put in the effort and make the code readable. Using these one letter variables forces the reader of t…
For example, suppose we have a function whose job is to calculate two vectors of weights and do something unless they are equal but opposite. Personally, I would rather read something like
v = someCalculation()
w = someOtherCalculation()
if (v ≠ -w) {
doSomething()
}
weights1 = someCalculation()
weights2 = someOtherCalculation()
if (not(vector.equals(weights1, vector.negate(weights2)))) {
doSomething()
}
In general, I think there could be advantages to using a broader but still selective symbol set for coding, as long as we also had good tool and font support to type and display all of the required symbols. I would be hesitant about including Greek letters in that symbol set, but that’s because several letters in the Greek alphabet look similar to other common letters or symbols, not because I think calling a value ω_0 is a bad idea if that’s how practitioners in the field would all write it mathematically.
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That... sounds like a special keyboard setup to me.
OK, I guess that’s a reasonable use of the word “special”. Here is what I was trying to get at: I can not effectively use my computer for anything without customizing the keyboard a little. I need to make the capslock key into an extra control key. I need to set up a compose key so I can type accents when writing in Spanish (even if I didn’t do that, what about writing people's names?). Even sticking with English, I…