Time we switched to unicode? (was Explanation of this Python language feature?)

[Rustom Mody]

On Tuesday, March 25, 2014 5:28:11 AM UTC+5:30, Ian wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 24, 2014 at 3:43 PM, Mark H Harris wrote:
> > On 3/24/14 4:03 AM, Ian Kelly wrote:
> >> The difference does not really lie in the lambda construct per se but in
> >> the binding style of closures. Functional languages tend to go one way
> >> here; imperative languages tend to go the other. {snip}
> >> The result may be more surprising to users accustomed to functional
> >> languages, but I claim that it is *less* surprising to users of other
> >> imperative languages.
> >    Aside from the sin of spelling out "lambda,"
> >       should be   ( \x y -> x + y ) a b )  but, neither here nor there...

> Well no, it *should* be λx y . x + y but apparently some people don't
> have that character on their keyboards, so it gets written as lambda
> or \ instead.  Personally I dislike the \ style; it doesn't really
> resemble a λ that closely, and to me the backslash denotes escape
> sequences and set differences.  Nor is Python alone in spelling out
> lambda: Scheme and Common Lisp spell it the same way. As far as I know
> the \ for λ is unique to Haskell.

Yeah: Its 2014 (at least out here)...
About time we started using unicode in earnest dont you think??

Id like to see the following spellings corrected:
lambda to λ
in to ∈
(preferably with the 'in' predicate and the 'in' in 'for' disambiguated)
set([]) to ∅

And some parentheses disambiguation
Internal ambiguity: Is '(...)' a paren? a function? a tuple?
External ambiguity: {} in python vs in set theory

[And now I hand it over to our very dear resident troll to explain the glories
of the FSR]