Re: [q-lang-users] More Unicode queries.

[Rob H. <hub...@gm...>]

> > [John] Once you have stripped comments and entities with more than one character
> > in them, you have a list of 2114 short, plausible names for 1509 useful
> > Unicode characters.  There are duplicates for historical reasons, like
> > ContourIntegral and conint -- longer dupes could be stripped if you
> > saw fit.

I'd strip the historical duplicates.

I think its okay for an entity to have more than one character.

> [Albert] I think that this is an excellent idea! Would everyone be happy with
> using the entity names instead of the unwieldy Unicode names?
>
> If so, then the remaining question is which syntax are we going to use
> in strings for that? I suggest something like \φ, as in:
>
> "The greek letter \φ is the 21st letter in the Greek alphabet."

I was thinking in terms of \N{...}, but I like \&...; too. Perhaps
that would be less confusing for Python (and other languages that I
can't bring myself to mention again :-) ) users.

> Any other suggestions? I'm looking forward to a nice lexical syntax
> flamefest. ;-)

I think the user should be able to define his own, but I'm not sure
how this should be expressed. Then if a user particularly needs a
character outside that set, he can define his own.

I can't think of a way to do it without introducing a new keyword such
as "entity".

Rob.