Dollar sign ($) on foriegn keyboards? (prothon)

[Peter Otten]

Mark Hahn wrote:

> We are considering switching to the dollar sign ($) for self, instead of
> the
> period ( . ) we are using now in Prothon.  Ruby uses the at-sign (@) for
> self, but our new usage of self also includes replacing the period for
> some attribute references, as in obj$func() versus obj.func(), and too
> many
> programs treat that as an email address and screw it up.  Also the S in
> the symbol $ reminds one of the S in $elf.
> 
> Can people from outside the U.S. tell me if typing the dollar sign often
> would be a problem in writing code?  Is it available and somewhat easy to
> type on international keyboards?

In Germany every serious programmer has to switch to the American layout
anyway because of {}[]@\~| (all odd AltGr combinations). As this is no
problem on Windows and Linux(KDE) (how about the Mac?), I recommend against
making special character choices based on keyboard layout.

Apart from that obj$func() hurts my eye more than obj->func() and
obj!func(). As always, Python shines here with its obj.func() :-)

Peter