From: Daniel Berger <djberg96@...>
Date: 2007-01-21T23:05:30+09:00
Subject: Re: Allowing Unicode in the grammar?

Nikolai Weibull wrote:
> On 1/19/07, Berger, Daniel <Daniel.Berger@qwest.com> wrote:
>> One of the things Fortress allows you to do is use Unicode in the 
>> language itself.  For example, instead of '==', you use '���'(U+2261).  
>> For those unable or unwilling to use that, Fortress also provides a 
>> macro equivalent such as 'EQ'.
>>
>> I don't expect you to support it, I was just wondering if you've ever 
>> considered it and what you think of the idea in general.
>>
>> If I had an initial wishlist, I would keep it small:
>>
>> ��� (U+2261)
>> ��� (U+2265)
>> ��� (U+2264)
>> ��� (U+2260)
>>
>> I'm not suggesting replacing '==', just allowing the Unicode code 
>> point to mean the same thing (and thus, allowing us to define it in 
>> our own classes as well).
>>
>> Or are we prisoners of QWERTY?
> 
> (Yeah, sorry, I'm not Matz, but I just couldn't help myself.)

No problem. I suppose I should have opened this question up to everyone. 
So, anyone else have any thoughts?

> I'm all for it.  The only incompatibility I see is that the stance so
> far has been that Ruby should be as encoding-independent as possible
> (with regard to the IO and String classes).  I don't know what the end
> result was, but there was discussion of using Python-styled
> script-encoding-declarations [1], and presumably the parser could
> toggle on handling of characters like those above if the script's
> encoding is Unicode.

Couldn't we just lean on $KCODE? And make UTF8 the default?

> (Warning!  Possible flame-bait below.)
> 
> It'd be really cool to be able to define additional operators at
> runtime (a patch for this was sent to ruby-talk a while ago (2005?),
> but it never really went anywhere), so that Set could take operators
> like ���, ���, and ���.  It's pushing it a bit, but I'd really appreciate
> being able to write stuff like
> 
>  puts n if n ��� (1..100)

Yes, that would be neat. I'm not sure where we would draw the line, 
though, as issues of readability and maintenance (for those who aren't 
familiar with mathematical notation) could become a concern.

Regards,

Dan