Re: Have we reached the asymptotic plateau of innovation in programming languages

"BartC" <bc@freeuk.com> writes:


> And many languages already make it possible to define aliases for keywords;


Which languages? Robin mentioned PL/I. Others?
[C and anything else with a preprocessor. -John]


And what about predefined libraries? I imagine it's not too hard for a
non-English speaker to memorize the meaning of 50-or-so English
keywords, but what about thousands of names in the predefined
libraries? Or third-party libraries?


> With Unicode, you have the situation that many identical glyphs have
> different character codes, creating problems with different identifiers that
> look exactly the same.


I'd solve that by allowing Unicode letters in identifiers, but require
the programmer to declare up front which ones they want to use (in a
project-wide configuration file of some sort). Nobody wants to use
all of Unicode -- they just want to use the letters of one or two
natural languages, plus maybe a few symbols like a proper <= sign.


In comments, anything goes (allow all Unicode characters).


- Bob

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