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

Adrian Zubarev adrian.zubarev at devandartist.com
Tue Aug 29 13:28:05 CDT 2017


I still would prefer ligature fonts (Fira-Code). All these complicated characters might be good and so but remeber there are more than one keyboard layout on this planet, some of those are far more complicated than the English keyboard layout. Even I struggle sometimes with simple {} and [] because these characters are not visible on my German keyboard layout at all.

--  
Adrian Zubarev
Sent with Airmail  

Am 29. August 2017 um 18:27:05, Félix Cloutier via swift-evolution (swift-evolution at swift.org(mailto:swift-evolution at swift.org)) schrieb:

>  
> If all the hard symbols are automatically converted by the editor, why can't the editor show you a "pretty" view and save as "regular" text? Why does it need compiler involvement if the problem can entirely be addressed in UI space?
>  
> > Le 29 août 2017 à 06:14, John Pratt via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org(mailto:swift-evolution at swift.org)> a écrit :  
> > 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(mailto: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://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode
> > > https://www.hanselman.com/blog/MonospacedProgrammingFontsWithLigatures.aspx
> > >  
> > > -Chris  
> > >  
> > >  
> > >  
> >  
> > _______________________________________________
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>  
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