Re: [Haskell-i18n] unicode notation \uhhhh implementation

On Fri, 2002-08-16 at 10:26, Ketil Z. Malde wrote:

Ashley Yakeley writes:

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Sure, but bear in mind Unicode names for characters are quite long, for instance

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GREEK SMALL LETTER THETA

Hmm...yes. My personal preference would be something close to (La)TeX. Although it is perhaps a bit niche, it *is* a standard lhs style (and one which I quite like, too).

I think there would be no harm in having the TeX names for convenience.

Would we need to maintain the list manually, then? Perhaps we could standardise Unicode names, but additionally maintain short synonyms it for greek letters and similar mathematical symbols, which I suspect are rather commonly used?

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.

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Right, but whatever it is it really should be an ASCII character: the point is to allow representation of all identifiers from 7-bit ASCII.

What's available, really? "~!?$%.,^:;" are taken, along with quotes, numerical symbols and parens. Are '#' and '&' still free?

Candidates I can think of might be:

1 &alpha -> similar to HTML entities 2 #alpha -> possible problems with C preprocessor?

How about #uhhhh? There is no C preprocessor directive like that, so it should be safe to run the unicode-preproc before cpp. The only thing is that GHC uses # in identifiers and pragmas, as far as I can see. Can someone comment? Sven Moritz