12 Jan
2012
12 Jan
'12
6:57 p.m.
I also wish to note that I have never been a member of the "anything beyond plain ASCII is fundamental evil" set; if we're going to think that way, just go back to BAUDOT and punched cards.
Well, it's similar to the 80 columns debate. You have to draw the line somewhere. It's not about fundamental evil vs. punch cards, but rather n vs. n+1. ASCII is a particularly well worn value of 'n'. In the case of records, we're not really out of symbols, there is still @, #, &, etc. It's just that we like the look of a dot, and we are out of dot lookalikes :) For that matter we have a high'dot though it would mess up the "x' = f x" convention. But it has fine precedent in perl 4 if I'm remembering correctly :)