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Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages

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Re: Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages

#181
Observation:

Most programming languages evolved from the limited selection of ASCII printable characters from the keys of early ASCII keyboards (which evolved from earlier typewriters and teletype machines)...

But these days we have Unicode -- a huge amount of potential symbols (and combinations of symbols!) that could be used in new programming languages (i.e., asterisk: '*', long used for multiplication could (finally!) be replaced with a true multiplication symbol: 'x' -- if an extended symbol space were used by the language...

Symbols could visually represent such things as loops, conditionals, variable declarations, etc., etc.

Pointers and pointer dereferencing (if the language supported it) -- could have their own symbols...

Would that be a good idea?

Well, if backwards ASCII compatibility is desired to run on old computers for whatever reason (in a future time when we need to revert back to older/simpler/more predictable systems because the AI's are out of control?) then maybe not...

But if we wanted graphical or quasi-graphical symbols to represent programming constructs more visually -- then maybe the idea has some merit...

Maybe a conversion program could be written that would convert between the new symbol set and ASCII, and maybe the programming language would be created to recognize both constructs...

And yes, I know that there is the Scratch programming language -- but I'm not talking about quite that visual! :-) The language I envision would still be physically typed on a keyboard, as most are today...

Anyway, great looking typeface!

Re: Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages

#183

Not trying to be negative, just confused: I don't really see how this font is "designed for symbol-heavy languages". The symbols look normal to me. Maybe the letters are a little more spaced? I'd love to be enlightened.

designer here. by symbol-heavy languages i mean languages like Perl and Haskell which make heavy use of symbols (sigils in Perl and operators in Haskell). Myna was designed after my frustration with other monospace fonts combined with my (self-imposed) inability to use ligatures.

why do you have this self imposed inability?

Re: Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's something I really like about this front. I'm not a huge fan of ligatures and think they're counter productive. Makes it a bit harder to see the differences though, so I think a comparison would be great.

i've now added a table comparing Myna's symbols with a few other popular fonts in the README.md (without naming the fonts explicitly).

That looks really helpful. Now that I can better see the difference, I'll definitely try it the next time I write Perl or Haskell!

Re: Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages

#185
post #45

This, like many fonts, fails to handle vertical arrows: | ^ v | Note that the raised appearance of `^` exists for compatibility with typewriters that use the backspace key to use it as a circumflex accent over lowercase letters. This is doubly obsolete today (we have real combined characters and can use them on uppercase). This is one of those cases where the name originally used for the character in various standard…

Not a solution to your issue but as my main use of arrows is in documentation I've just mapped ↓ ↑ → ← to a covenient place on my keyboard. It's pretty at least

It allows comments to indicate the thing they're talking about ↑

Or logical → implications

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