Re: [Haskell-cafe] Unicode Haskell source -- Yippie!

A smart, recently proposed alternative is using a font that does this automatically for you: https://github.com/i-tu/Hasklig In my opinion, this gives you all benefits of unicode syntax without imposing the drawbacks on others, and you don't even have to set up a custom input method to conveniently type them in. Quoting: Some Haskell programmers have resorted to unicode symbols in code as a solution (⇒, ← etc.). This opens a whole new can of worms. In addition to encoding/compatibility problems and all the reasons it never worked out for APL, these symbols are one-character-wide and therefore eye-strainingly small. Hasklig solves this problem the way typographers have always solved ill-fitting characters which co-occur often: ligatures. The underlying code stays the same — only the representation changes. On Thu 24 Apr 2014 21:02:30 BST, Tikhon Jelvis wrote:

I'm actually a fan of using Unicode in my code. As people like to say, code is read more often than it's written, so I'm willing to make typing a bit harder in return for making the code prettier.

Happily, typing Unicode characters is quite easy with a good editor (Emacs). I use the TeX input mode which just lets me use TeX names for symbols, but somebody has actually written a Haskell-specific mode which might be even better[1]. I might try it some day.

One peculiar habit I have is using x₁ x₂ x₃ instead of x1, x2, x3 or x_1, x_2, x_3. I definitely find the Unicode version easier to read and work with, although it probably helps that Emacs highlights the number in a different color.

Unfortunately, this is a minority opinion at the moment. Even in *this* day and age, people still find Unicode too difficult to type!

For my internal code, this is not a problem, but it's kept me from putting any Unicode in public APIs. Shame.

I also don't use UnicodeSyntax because Emacs can do most of the transformations transparently for me without changing the underlying file. You can turn this on by setting `haskell-font-lock-symbols' to t. I find it makes for much nicer code that's easier to read and, even more importantly, easier to skim.

[1]: https://github.com/roelvandijk/emacs-haskell-unicode-input-method

On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 12:51 PM, Roel van Dijk mailto:vandijk.roel@gmail.com> wrote:

I think it is a nice feature if used sparingly.

Note that while Unicode symbols are a normal part of the Haskell language you can also turn on some Unicode syntax using the UnicodeSyntax [1] language extension. This means the following will be accepted by GHC:

(∈) ∷ ∀ α. Eq α ⇒ α → [α] → Bool (∈) = elem

You might want to take a look at some packages I created that define some Unicode symbols for common operators and values [2, 3, 4].

Opinions on whether this is a good idea vary. My anecdotal observation is that it seems to be used more by people who speak a native language that is already poorly served by ASCII. Perhaps because they are already used to not being able to simply type every character they need.

1 - http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/users_guide/syntax-extns.html#un... 2 - http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Unicode-symbols 3 - http://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-unicode-symbols 4 - http://hackage.haskell.org/package/containers-unicode-symbols

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