[Haskell-cafe] Richer (than ascii) notation for haskell source?
andrewcoppin at btinternet.com
Wed May 14 14:32:02 EDT 2008
Patrick Surry wrote:
> Probably a silly question, but for me one of the nice things about
> Haskell is that it's a lot like just writing math(s). But in contrast
> to math you lose a lot of notational flexibility being limited to the
> ascii character set in your source code.
> It would be nice to be able to use a richer set of symbols in your
> source code for operators and functions (e.g. integral, sum, dot and
> cross-product, …), as well as variables (the standard upper and
> lower-case greek for example, along with things like super- and
> sub-scripting, bold/italic and what-not). You could imagine ending up
> with source code that reads just like a mathematical paper.
> Don't know how I'd actually then write/maintain the source-code - some
> WYSIWYG editor or effectively writing it in '(la)tex'? Maybe that's
> what Knuth is on about with his 'literate programming' weave/tangle
> stuff which I don't know much about - does that translate to Haskell?
Personally, I'd just like to be able to get rid of "->", "\" and other
such hacks. Would it be possible to amend GHC so that it accepts "->"
and [whatever the Unicode codepoint for "left arrow" is] and treats both
IIRC, GHC already accepts Unicode input. I seem to recall some people
debating what to do about languages that don't have a concept of
"uppercase" and "lowercase" - the Haskell language critically hinges on
that distinction. But then, if you wanted to write your Haskell programs
in arabic or something, I would think the fact that all the language
keywords and every library ever written are in English, so...
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