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

[John Pratt]

The case I am making is that matrix multiplication would greatly benefit.

If by typing "matrix()" a real algebra matrix popped out of code with
multiple columns
spanning multiple rows of text, wouldn't that be a major improvement for
everyone who
does math or graphics?  There are a lot of these things.

Graphical elements acting as code can do much more than plain text
formatting
of any programming language's syntax.



On Tue, Aug 29, 2017 at 1:38 PM, Adrian Zubarev via swift-evolution <
swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:

> 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) 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> 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> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Aug 28, 2017, at 9:58 PM, John Pratt via swift-evolution <
>> 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/MonospacedProgrammingFontsWith
>> Ligatures.aspx
>>
>> -Chris
>>
>>
>>
>>
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