<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" class=""><div dir="auto" class=""><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">On Aug 28, 2017, at 7:57 PM, John Pratt via swift-evolution <<a href="mailto:swift-evolution@swift.org" class="">swift-evolution@swift.org</a>> wrote:<br class=""><br class=""></div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8" class="">I sent a postal envelope to the Swift team with an article I wrote, arguing that<div class="">symbols and graphics would push the programming language forward.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Wouldn’t it be nice to have an actual multiplication matrix broken out into code,</div><div class="">instead of typing, “matrix()”? It seems to me Swift has the chance to do that.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Also: why does "<==" still reside in code as "less than or equal to” when</div><div class="">there is a unicode equivalent that looks neat? </div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Why can’t the square of x have a superscript of 2 instead of having “pow(x,2)? </div><div class="">I think this would make programming much easier to deal with.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">I expound on this issue in my article:</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><a href="http://www.noctivagous.com/nct_graphics_symbols_prglngs_draft2-3-12.pdf" class="">http://www.noctivagous.com/nct_graphics_symbols_prglngs_draft2-3-12.pdf</a></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Thank you for reading.</div></blockquote><br class=""><div class="">I whole-heartedly agree with the sentiment, but I think you're approaching this from the wrong direction... Unicode isn't used much because there's no simple, easy, and <i class="">universal</i> way to input unicode characters. Personally, I use a custom keyboard layout with tons of stuff mapped to ctrl- and alt-keys, but that breaks things like, say, Terminal.app, because ctrl-d prints ∂ instead of sending the control character (so I switch back to a keyboard layout without the control keys mapped, which is annoying). We need to solve the general unicode input problem before we can start seriously pushing for its use to be required, and that's far outside of Swift's scope.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">As far as formatting matrices "correctly" (and I also wish they could be displayed the way you demonstrated in your write-up), I think that'd be more a feature of some sort of custom display layer in Xcode than of macOS's or Linux's text system. Maybe it'd fit in with some other OS's type system, but "typewriter text" is too ingrained into the text systems of Windows, macOS, and Linux (and every other OS I can think of) for "pretty print" matrices to work across all text-based applications (which is what I think it'd take to catch on).</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">- Dave Sweeris</div></div></body></html>