[PEP draft 2] Adding new math operators

[Gregory Lielens]

ben at co.and.co wrote:
> 
> Huaiyu Zhu <hzhu at localhost.localdomain> wrote:
> 
> > Proposed extension
> > ------------------
> >
> > 1.  New operators ~+ ~- ~* ~/ ~** ~+= ~-= ~*= ~/= ~**= are added to core
> >     Python.
> 
> Some minor remark:
> the '~' is an awful character to type a 'azerty'-keyboard (Alt Gr + '='
> on Belgian keyboard, '=' is located on '/'(qwerty)). Now, remember
> the reason Belgian and French people like Python is of the relative
> absence of braces '{}', which are located on an even more
> finger-breaking position (Alt-Gr + 9 and Alt-Gr + 0, again on
> Belgian keyboard).
> 
> We do have ç, à, é, è, ù and µ at very conveniant places. Perhaps
> you could localize the operators ?

On azerty (belgian version also, as you could guess from my name :-)), °
(degree symbol) is a quite obvious choice for this usage, in fact better
than ~ because it is nor curently used in Python, and is (warning -
highly personal opinion) more representative of the intended elementwise
behavior (closer to matlab .*, for example).
However, beeing ASCII, ~ is at least accessible on all types of
keyboards, while trying to find ° on a qwerty keyboard could be fun -
not to mention that some fonts does not have °...
The problem of lack of keyboard/font support is even stronger for
unicode symbols, which imho support the proposed ~.

Greg.