FWIW, I am constantly thinking about this. (Don’t have a good way to test it experimentally, but I do consider it.) But I’m a neuroscientist, so…
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FWIW, I am constantly thinking about this. (Don’t have a good way to test it experimentally, but I do consider it.) But I’m a neuroscientist, so…
(make a fork, I would donate!)
When I think about this, I do not think that the barrier is not being able to use more unicode code points. And I already can write libraries that do things however I please. So…no fork needed, as long as I can turn off warnings about infix notation. Indeed, it is the lack of needing a fork that is one of the things that makes me pleased with Scala.
I don’t mean about unicode specifically, but the general ethos and direction of the language. The recent restriction on infix modifiers is a bad sign, and there are many in this community who, if they had it their way, would completely ban infix notation and symbol operators and whatever else they consider “too magical”, in an effort to streamline Scala into a more boring and business-friendly language (as if we don’t already have enough of those).
I would support a fork that explicitly stands against that pragmatic attitude, and doesn’t restrict features out of a paternalistic view that developers can’t be trusted to use them responsibly in making their own decisions.
Note that no one is for banning infix symbolic operations (ambiguous in your sentence)
(Some people do think it is generally a bad idea however)
Also the “many in this community” tend to be people with a lot of experience writing Scala, and which have a lot of experience with both the upsides and the downsides of these features
Well mainline Scala already has some funding problems, so I would encourage you to donate to organizations supporting it instead !
(As “paternalistic” as it might be, it seems to me to be much less so than other languages)
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My comment, cited above, was a pun on the fold operator.
/:(
That emoticon may be construed as a Frenchman with a jaunty beret and moustache.
I remember I contributed something to improve Unicode support, with the idea that identifiers should appear natural to the reader. However, as surely mentioned somewhere in this thread, syntax has semantics, such as uppercase identifiers in patterns, or operator characters for operators. (Edit: apologies to Shirley.)
That is the Viktor Klang operator. It is so deeply embedded in Scala culture that I’m not sure it can be requisitioned for any other purpose. But I am not a mathematician.