Assignment Versus Equality

[Rustom Mody]

On Monday, June 27, 2016 at 5:53:07 PM UTC+5:30, Bob Gailer wrote:
> On Jun 26, 2016 5:29 PM, "Michael Torrie"  wrote:
> >
> > On 06/26/2016 12:47 PM, Christopher Reimer wrote:
> 
> > Sounds like fun.  Every aspiring programmer should write an interpreter
> > for some language at least once in his life!
> 
> In the mid 1970' s I helped maintain an installation of IBM' s APL
> interpreter at Boeing Computer Services. APL uses its own special character
> set, making code unambiguous and terse. It used a left-arrow for
> assignment, which was treated as just another operator. I will always miss
> "embedded assignment".


In the past, APL's ← may not have been practicable (ie
- without committing to IBM... which meant
- $$$ 
- Also it was a hardware commitment (trackball?)
- etc

Today that '←' costs asymptotically close to '='
To type :: 3 chars CAPSLOCK '<' '-'
To setup :: [On Ubuntu Unity]
   System-Settings → Keyboard → Shortcuts-Tab → Typing → Make Compose CAPSLOCK
To see :: Its ONE CHAR, just like '=' and ½ of ':='

tl;dr Anyone opposing richer charsets is guaranteedly using arguments from 1970

PS Google Groups is wise enough to jump through hoops trying to encode my message
above as latin-1, then as Windows 1252 and only when that does not work as 
UTF-8
ie it garbles ← into <- etc
So some हिंदी (ie Hindi) to convince GG to behave