[erlang-questions] A proposal for Unicode variable and atom names in Erlang.

[HH Veldstra]

On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 12:33 PM, Jesper Louis Andersen
<jesper.louis.andersen@REDACTED> wrote:
>
> On Oct 22, 2012, at 11:24 AM, HH Veldstra <hasan.veldstra@REDACTED> wrote:
>
>> +1. Outwith very specific circumstances allowing non-English code is
>> dumb if for no other reason that it will drastically reduce the pool
>> of programmers that can be hired to work on your system.
>
> Not all unicode symbols are meant to be for foreign languages. There are some symbols which would be nice
> to use in your programs. Some of the more mathematical code tend to use lots of greek symbols for instance. If you can name your variable with the right symbol, it becomes more readable since it is closer to what the paper writes.
>
> But to be really powerful you need ways to infix operators as well, so you can write ⊕ for 'xor' and so on.

This might be off-topic now, but rather than modifying the core of a
language for something that is of no clear benefit 99.99% of the time,
one would be better off configuring their editor to handle the case
you've described. This for Emacs for instance:
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/PrettyLambda It has the benefit of not
interfering with how other people like to see the code, and it takes
way less time to set up than it is to even argue about the subject of
this thread, much less wait for the suggestions to be implemented.