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

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

#201

Post by creata »

taeric wrote: post #150
harikb wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in my that in Unicode there are several symbols that look alike. It is not just the character set that matters, but how many of such things we have. May be instead of arguing for Unicode, community needs to come up with a unambiguous smaller set of symbols languages should support.

I dread the day when I edit some code that has both \Sigma and \sum in the same scope.

You mean ∑ and Σ? Yeah, that'd be terrible. It doesn't seem like it should be Unicode's job to assign meaning to characters, so I don't know why ∑ ("U+2211 N-Ary Summation") exists.

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

#203

Post by kaba0 »

kennywinker wrote: post #193
kaba0 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feel free to reason about a complex statistics formula with full-blown variable names. There are reasons for short variable names. Pass into a specific function a descriptive name of what you do, but do use the mathematically "accepted" writing mode in the implementation of a well-known function.

> There are reasons for short variable names Which are? I suspect the reasons are a combination of the price of paper and ink, the history of teaching using chalkboards. None of those mean we can’t make the canonical version of an equation the expanded representation. Why do we all know e=mc2 and not energy = mass * lightspeed^2. The broader the base of people that have to interact with a formula, the less mathy the…

How about Gauss’s distribution’s density function? Or a numerically stable version of a simpler formula? Also, you forgot the usual case of implementing a whitepaper with mathematical notation. It is much easier to proof read that, when you copy largely the same in your program as well. And if you pass in the readable energy, mass, etc variables, inside the function you can use the domain-specific mathematical notation. That way it will be readable both outside and inside.

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

#204

Post by vincent-toups »

This really strikes me as a "not even wrong" post. I'm not sure there is anything wrong with programming and if there is something wrong with it, the problem sure isn't "there are not enough operators."

My favorite languages don't even have the _idea_ of operators and in languages with custom operators, with all their crazy ass rules about precedence and content-free representations, I'm always re-translating the code to s-expressions in my mind.

The Scheme way seems fine to me - operator-like functions when the meaning is universally understood and then human-readable names for literally everything else.

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

#205

Post by bombcar »

tarboreus wrote: post #200
Zababa wrote: post #139

> 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…

Yeah, I'm a blind coder and having color matter like this does not sound like fun.

blue int end blue red main end red green open parentheses …

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

#206

Post by guenthert »

smasher164 wrote: post #202
guenthert wrote: post #197

It's a terrible idea. Sooner or later there will be identifiers with homoglyphs. Good luck debugging that!

Supporting unicode doesn't mean you can't defend against homograph attacks. See http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr39/ .

I quote from that reference: As discussed in Unicode Technical Report #36, "Unicode Security Considerations" [UTR36], confusability among characters cannot be an exact science.

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

#207

Post by b3morales »

quantified wrote: post #160
leephillips wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This thread is making the point that the issue isn’t the character set, but rather the keyboards. We’re probably locked in, there is so much inertia around the standard QWERTY with a few arrows and Esc. Maybe an integrated system builder with large scale like Apple could shift things slightly.

Indeed; Mac OS has supported easy entry of alternate (non-ASCII) characters on "self-inserting" keys with Option (which can be further modified with Shift) since the 80s. Granted it's a limited set, but they're useful. Here's a sampling “” … ™ Ω ç ß ∂ ∑ † π «» ¬ ˚ ∆ ƒ ∂

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

#208

Post by taeric »

creata wrote: post #201
taeric wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dread the day when I edit some code that has both \Sigma and \sum in the same scope.

You mean ∑ and Σ? Yeah, that'd be terrible. It doesn't seem like it should be Unicode's job to assign meaning to characters, so I don't know why ∑ ("U+2211 N-Ary Summation") exists.

Yeah. I was offering up an example.

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

#209

Post by taeric »

robocat wrote: post #194
harikb wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in my that in Unicode there are several symbols that look alike. It is not just the character set that matters, but how many of such things we have. May be instead of arguing for Unicode, community needs to come up with a unambiguous smaller set of symbols languages should support.

And ASCII has the reverse problem: one symbol gets extremely overloaded semantically (syntax wars?!). Tell me what does ":" mean? Now if I tell you the language is Typescript, what does "?" mean? I personally believe semantic overloading causes a lot of problems, but we are so steeped in the existing limitations that we don't recognise it is a problem.

Odd choice. Punctuation, by itself, is virtually meaningless.

Language overloads things. Pretty much period. I doubt programming will get away from that.

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

#210

Post by umvi »

leephillips wrote: post #134
stan_rogers wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And again, this helps other people who have to edit your code how?

Well, if my Julia code ever gets to the point where other people want to edit it, the community has embraced Unicode, so there won’t be a problem there. More generally, I’ll turn my comment into a question: how are people using computers without already having them set up to easily type these characters?

> how are people using computers without already having them set up to easily type these characters?

Current solution for most people is google + clipboard

For example, to type the word "cliché" here, I googled it, then copied it, then pasted it.

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