On 2008 May 14, at 22:07, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:
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.)
Hm. Newer Unicode standard than the version supported by OSX and GNOME, I take it? That's not so helpful if nobody actually supports the characters in question. (My Mac claims 166CC is in an unassigned area, and no supplied font has the others. It does at least acknowledge that the others should exist and are "letters".) Hm, U+2144 as an approximation? I still suspect it would not be outside the pale to make λ a keyword. We already have several, after all.
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.
:) -- brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH