Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!nrl-cmf!cmcl2!brl-adm!brl-smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: The D Programming Language
Message-ID: <7399@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: 2 Mar 88 18:14:09 GMT
References: <12073@brl-adm.ARPA>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 18

In article <12073@brl-adm.ARPA> dsill@NSWC-OAS.arpa (Dave Sill) writes:
>The trouble is not that we have too many characters available, it's
>that we have too few!  For example, if we had a left-pointing-arrow
>character that could be used for assignment, the whole == versus =
>problem would not exist.

My point is that it does no good to introduce a language that uses
funny APL-like symbols, when the vast majority of existing and
near-future terminals and printers won't support the symbols.  (I
doubt that many even support the full set already registered with
ISO.)  What you end up with are a bunch of kludges, like the proposed
ANSI C trigraphs, that everybody ends up having to cope with.  By
limiting the language symbols to those commonly available, you make
programs much more readable in practice.

It isn't clear to me that funny APL-like symbols are preferable to
short keywords (for example).  Note that even the mathematicians are
starting to use such notations in preference to inventing mystical
symbols, especially in category theory.