From: shyouhei@... Date: 2016-06-13T01:16:27+00:00 Subject: [ruby-core:75965] [Ruby trunk Feature#715] Ruby interpreter should understand UTF-8 symbols with special meaning Issue #715 has been updated by Shyouhei Urabe. I happen to be a Japanese and understands Japanese language. Throughout history of our programming language construction, many Japanese developers tried to create Japanese-aware programming languages, then failed. Without exceptions. It has been possible to type "���" character natively for a loooong time to us. Yet, that didn't help at all for those failed challenges. Everyone could understand what the program says easily, but no one wanted to write anything in that language. It was just too annoying to use IME to program something. I bet other people have similar failures for other natural languages too. Like Matz said in comment #2, it is worse than you think. People just avoid using such things. I can point other failed similar attempts, for instance C's trigraphs. I wonder if you could learn something from those failures, not just they are "predate UTF-8". ---------------------------------------- Feature #715: Ruby interpreter should understand UTF-8 symbols with special meaning https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/715#change-59157 * Author: Jan Maurits Faber * Status: Rejected * Priority: Normal * Assignee: ---------------------------------------- I would like the ruby interpreter to understand symbols such as the greater-than-or-equal sign, as an alias for '>='. This is not simply because it would look pretty, it would reduce the cognitive load on the programmer. At the moment many ascii characters are overloaded to mean different things in different contexts. Especially characters like $, :, > and =. If the relevant symbols were used then the brains of the programmer would be free to do more useful things. For example, something like: ```ruby a>=b ? {:a=>!b} : nil ``` Could be displayed as: ```ruby a���b ? :a ��� ��b : ��� ``` (in case the UTF-8 characters don't come across: I just replaced several characters with mathematical symbols) If the Ruby interpreter would support this then text editors can be improved to automatically insert the appropriate symbol. I don't know of any language that can do this yet, so it would be a unique selling point for Ruby, but it would seem rather easy to implement. -- https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/ Unsubscribe: