Little things that matter in language design

Posted Jun 10, 2013 16:58 UTC (Mon) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
In reply to: Little things that matter in language design by khim
Parent article: Little things that matter in language design

The idea that programming languages don't use UAX #15 for symbol matching due to performance problems would be an easier sell if UAX #15 anywhere near to approached the difficulty of something like C++ symbol mangling.

You seem to be suffering some quite serious display problems with non-ASCII text on your system, I don't know what to suggest other than maybe you can find someone to help figure out what you did wrong, or upgrade to something a bit more modern. I've seen glitches like those you describe but mostly quite some years ago. Your example program displays two visually identical characters on my system but I can believe your system doesn't do this, only I would point out that it's /a bug/.

Even allowing for that your last paragraph is hard to understand. Are you claiming that because on your system some symbols are rendered incorrectly depending on how they were encoded those symbols are _different_ lexicographically and everybody else (who can't see these erroneous display differences) should accept that?

to post comments

Little things that matter in language design

Posted Jun 11, 2013 9:07 UTC (Tue) by etienne (guest, #25256) [Link] (1 responses)

Just a $0.02:
> You seem to be suffering some quite serious display problems with non-ASCII text on your system

It seems (some) people want to use a fixed-width font to write programs, mostly because some Quality Enhancement Program declared the TAB character obsolete, and SPACE character width is not a constant in variable-width fonts editors.
Most software language needs indentations...
With non-ASCII chars in fixed-width font, if you even get the char shape in the font you are using, the only solution is probably to start drawing each char every N (constant) pixels and have the end of large chars superimpose with the beginning of the next char...

Little things that matter in language design

Posted Jun 11, 2013 10:13 UTC (Tue) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

I use a fixed-width font to write code chiefly out of pure inertia: most of my coding is done in text editors running in character-cell terminals. Code written in Inform 7 is an exception (the Inform 7 IDE's editor uses a proportional font by default, and the IDE is so well-adapted to the needs of typical Inform 7 programming that not using it is silly), but Inform 7 statements look like (somewhat stilted) English prose so I don't mind so much.