Ashley Yakeley
Sure, but bear in mind Unicode names for characters are quite long, for instance
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). 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?
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? 3 _alpha -> this is an existing identifier, but would be consistent 4 {alpha} -> also has a meaning already, even if problems should be rather rare 5 {\alpha} -> TeX'y - is it meaningful H98? Okay, shoot 'em down! -kzm -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants