Well, I finally ran into a Python Unicode problem, sort of

[Lawrence D’Oliveiro]

On Monday, July 4, 2016 at 6:08:51 PM UTC+12, Jussi Piitulainen wrote:
> Something could be done, but if the intention is to allow
> mathematical notation, it needs to be done with care.

Mathematics uses single-character variable names so that multiplication can be implicit.

An old, stillborn language design from the 1960s called CPL* had two syntaxes for variable names:
* a single lowercase letter, optionally followed by any number of primes “'”;
* an uppercase letter followed by letters or digits.

It also allowed implicit multiplication; single-letter identifiers could be run together without spaces, but multi-character ones needed to be delimited by spaces or non-identifier characters. E.g.

  Sqrt(bb - 4ac)
  Area ≡ Length Width

*It was never fully implemented, but a cut-down derivative named BCPL did get some use. Some researchers at Bell Labs took it as their starting point, first creating a language called “B”, then another one called “C” ... well, the rest is history.