[swift-evolution] Beyond Typewriter-Styled Code in Swift, Adoption of Symbols

[John Pratt]

Hi Chris: Please read the article that I originally posted and mailed to the Swift team
before shooting down what I said:

http://www.noctivagous.com/nct_graphics_symbols_prglngs_draft2-3-12.pdf

Alan Kay’s FONC project rewrote entire projects in far less code by
using symbols in the Maru and Nile programming languages.  Alan Kay, as you know,
is the father of Smalltalk.  Unicode symbols can be very powerful.






> On Aug 29, 2017, at 12:28 AM, Chris Lattner <clattner at nondot.org> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Aug 28, 2017, at 9:58 PM, John Pratt via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution at swift.org>> wrote:
>> 
>> I think the editor would recognize that "<==“ was just
>> typed and replace it with the unicode character ≤ immediately.
>> 
>> Likewise, x^2 would be recognized and turned into x with 2 in superscript.
>> 
>> As for how the UI would work for other types of symbols,
>> there are all kinds of techniques for that.  That is a UI issue,
>> for a UI design team to address.  XCode’s code completion is just one
>> example of how UI can manage input issues.
> 
> There is no reason to change the language to enable this.  Editors could do this automatically.  Alternatively, you could just use a programming font with ligatures for operators, see e.g.:
> https://medium.com/larsenwork-andreas-larsen/ligatures-coding-fonts-5375ab47ef8e <https://medium.com/larsenwork-andreas-larsen/ligatures-coding-fonts-5375ab47ef8e>
> https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode <https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode>
> https://www.hanselman.com/blog/MonospacedProgrammingFontsWithLigatures.aspx <https://www.hanselman.com/blog/MonospacedProgrammingFontsWithLigatures.aspx>
> 
> -Chris
> 
> 
> 

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