On 15 May 2008, at 7:19 am, Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:
Unfortunately, while I thought there was a distinct lambda sign that wasn't the lowercase Greek letter, there isn't. (That said, I don't see why it couldn't be a keyword. You'd need a space after it.)
There are three lambda letters: lower and upper case Greek, and Ugaritic (U+1038D). But there are also mathematical symbols: U+166CC mathematical bold small lamda (sic.) U+1D706 mathematical italic small lamda (sic.) U+1D740 mathematical bold italic small lamda (sic.) U+1D77A mathematical sans-serif bold small lamda (sic.) U+1D7B4 mathematical sans-serif bold italic small lamda (sic.) These things are visually letters, but as mathematical symbols they should not combine into words. Except that to my surprise, nay, to my utter astonishment, the Unicode 5.1 character data base classifies them as letters just like the letter "e". At least to give editors a fighting chance of matching their concept of a "word" with Haskell tokens, it might be better to use nabla instead of lambda. Other old APL fans may understand why (:-). Alternatively, didn't Church really want to use a character rather like a down tack, and have to squish it to get a letter his printer was happy with? Nah, nabla for me. -- "I don't want to discuss evidence." -- Richard Dawkins, in an interview with Rupert Sheldrake. (Fortean times 232, p55.)