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

[Terry Reedy]

On 3/25/2014 2:50 AM, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 5:41 PM, Rustom Mody <rustompmody at gmail.com> wrote:
>> ALl of which is isomorphic to Steven's point that forty is less
>> eyeballable than 40
>>
>> And mine that ∅ is more eyeballable than set([])
>
> I don't disagree that it is; the short tokens are easier to read in
> quantity. I just don't think that it's sufficient to justify piles of
> new and hard-to-look-up operators and things. (And a literal notation
> for an empty set would be a good thing. If I were designing a
> Python-like language from scratch now, I'd probably differentiate sets
> and dictionaries better, which would allow each one to have its own
> empty literal.)

If {} were empty set, {:} would be empty dict. This was considered but 
rejected for 3.0 as breaking too much code for too little benefit.


-- 
Terry Jan Reedy