unicode as valid naming symbols

[Ian Kelly]

On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 2:19 AM, Antoon Pardon
<antoon.pardon at rece.vub.ac.be> wrote:
> On 01-04-14 02:47, Ian Kelly wrote:
>> On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 1:31 PM, Antoon Pardon
>> <antoon.pardon at rece.vub.ac.be> wrote:
>>> Second of all I
>>> think a good chosen symbolic name can be more readable than a
>>> name in a character set you are not familiar with. A good chosen
>>> symbol will evoke a meaning with a lot of people. A name in a
>>> character set you are not familiar with is just gibberish to
>>> you.
>> Well, this is the path taken by APL.  It has its supporters.  It's not
>> known for being readable.
>
> No that is not the path taken by APL. AFAICS identifiers in APL are just
> like identifiers in python. The path taken by APL was that there were
> a lot more operators available that used non-alphanumeric characters.
>
> AFICS APL programs tend to be unreadable because they are mostly written
> in a very concise style.
>
> I think this is more the path taken by lisp-like languages where '+' is
> a name just like 'alpha' or 'r2d2'. In scheme I can just do the following.
>
> (define √ sqrt)
> (√ 4)

You're still using the symbol as the name of an operation, though, so
I see no practical difference from the APL style.  The operation just
happens to be user-defined rather than built-in.  Granted that in
Scheme or in Python-with-arbitrary-Unicode-identifiers you could just
as easily name a variable √, but I don't think that is what you are
proposing in terms of choosing symbols to evoke meaning.

> Which will give me the normal result. Maybe I missed it but I haven't heard
> scheme being called an unreadable language.

Well, I have, but I think that usually has more to do with an excess
of parentheses.