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I think it's crazy that we limit programming languages to using ASCII in 2022. Yes, I understand the chicken-and-egg issues of input, but it still seems like we're limiting ourselves as developers if we don't make use of a richer symbology. I know Raku supports some Unicode operators and Guy Steele's Fortress language also supported non-ASCII symbols so it is possible. But I'm not holding my breath. This is just one old man's crazy opinion.


Julia supports most unicode characters for function and variable names (and operators), so you can write, eg, "∑(x,µ) = x ⊗ µ" and it won't complain.


AFAIK Fortress did not actually support non-ASCII symbols in the code. What the Fortress team did is have a display layer that was fed a list of symbols using ‘\BigSum’ style ASCII and then merely displayed a selected Unicode symbol in the editor.


Ah, thanks. It's been a while since I looked at the Fortress papers.


JavaScript, Java and C# all allow Unicode characters as identifiers.


We do. Look at Scala. Almost no limitations here.




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