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

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Tue, 25 Mar 2014 05:53:45 -0700, Rustom Mody wrote:

> And if we had hyphen '‐' distinguished from minus '-' then we could have
> lispish names like call‐with‐current‐continuation properly spelt. And
> then generations of programmers will thank us for increasing their
> debugging overtime!!

:-)


Full Unicode support in a language is, alas, a double-edged sword. While 
it has advantages, it also has disadvantages.

py> А = 1
py> A = А + 1
py> assert A == А
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
AssertionError


While I can see the appeal of certain Unicode symbols, I really wouldn't 
like to have to deal with code that looks like this:

x∫2*y+∬e**3∺z≹(x+1)≽y⋝w

If I wanted line-noise, I know where to get Perl :-)



-- 
Steven D'Aprano
http://import-that.dreamwidth.org/