this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
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Well, that was something.... I have used ligatures in my code editor for quite a few years now, and I have NEVER been confused about the ambiguity this person is so upset about. Why? I have never ever seen the Unicode character for not equals in a code block, simply since it is not a valid character in any known language. In fact, I have never even seen it in a String where it actually would be legal, probably since nobody knows how to type that using a standard keyboard. This whole article felt like someone with a severe diagnose have locked in on some hypothetical correctness issue, that simply isn't a problem in the real world.
But, if you for some reason find ligatures confusing, then you shouldn't use them. But, just to be clear, there is not a right of wrong like this blog post tries to argue, it is a matter of personal taste.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL_68
ALGOL 68, mother of all the C-likes, has ≠. There ace quite a few languages support Unicode such as ≠. What is not equals then? Exclamation mark + equals? Forward slash + equals? Tilde + equals? Less than + greater than? Equals + forward slash + equals. What is more clear than all of those aforementioned options from ‘modern programming languages’?
2260 ≠ Not Equal To. Type what you mean, specifically. Your programming language doesn’t support it? Your language is hurting clarity.Good to know that every time I feel the need to use ALGOL 68, I must remember to disable ligatures. Still not sure this is going to be a huge problem 😂
No need to ignore history. Older ALGOL versions used several now-Unicode operators. A lot of language support it. You have most of the APL + its dialects (such as BQN), theorem provers like Agda and LEAN 4, functional languages supporting Unicode Preludes like Haskell and PureScript, MATLAB, Mathematica, RPL, Raku, Julia, AppleScript, and of course the TI BASICs. Not to mention
≠is what is used in general math(s) & handwriting. All this to say, it’s more common than you are leading on.Are you saying that it is common that people use utf8 characters that you cannot easily type on a standard keyboard? I'm very skeptical of this claim.
APL programmers usually use an APL keyboard layers. Some people use Compose. Vim offers digraphs. Some editors can replace with a macro. Input is a solved issue, but the outputs can often either be more clear for reading either for lack of ambiguity such as the ligatures or in information density as seen especially in the APLs (see a 1975 demo) (hence Chinese writing taking up less paper space being more information dense). The ligatures themselves are still taking up the same physical character space since that is how ligatures operate. I believe the goal here is to achieve something similar with ligatures, except taking an opentype hack instead. If you believe ligatures are more readable, then everyone should be seeing these concocted symbols on any device or font, which Unicode offers without the hacks or ambiguity.