Sven Moritz Hallberg
Would allowing the full Unicode names give an advantage? Something like GREEK_SMALL_LETTER_THETA is almost half a line and might do more harm to the code readability than uhhhh.
Well, it depends, I suppose. I'm more likely to be able to remember that '#GREEK_SMALL_LETTER_THETA represents an angle than \uXXXX. Although, I of course would prefer '&theta' or '{\theta}' or something like that. It is possible that a shortish list of TeX symbols or HTML entities, or both, would suffice. Readability is one thing, however, I'm not quite sure how layout would be affected with this. I'm often surprised to hear about the problems people experience with layout, it just seems to work for me. (Using Emacs and auto-indent; there's rarely any problem pressing TAB until the right indentation is reached.) However, now it appears that indentation might change, according to encoding used. How do we solve that? The simple solution is to count one Unicode character as one indentation character, but that would mean having alignments visually distorted if we are using other notations. Emacs could probably handle this and display things correctly, but do we want that extra complexity? case t of Rad _ -> foo Deg _ -> bar -- ^visual alignment case &theta of Rad _ -> foo Deg _ -> bar -- ^aligned, but only by counting (Ditto for \uXXXXXXXX, of course) After all, isn't layout intended to make things *easier* to read? I think I'm in favor of requiring a line break when starting a layout block, but I suppose that will break a lot of existing code. (e.g case &theta of Rad _ -> foo Deg _ -> bar and only require more indentation (i.e. leading whitespace) than the preceeding 'case' opening the block. ) -kzm -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants