For emacs, just bind a key (C-. say) to (ucs-insert #X2218). ucs-insert comes from ucs-tables.
Sounds easy enough. I'll test emacs and my terminal and see about it.
2) Will it show up in PuTTY (and everyone else's terminals/IDEs)?
Eventually.
in everyone's mail readers (including Gmail)?
Eventually, I should think. I'm using nmh, which has to be one of the least trendy MUAs about, and that can do it. What does this: ∘ look like in your email reader?
Looks great in Gmail.
It's far worse than that. We are stuck in an idiotic land where the meaning of a file depends on the meaning of a user settable variable in the OS. This is one of the many unpleasant consequences of untyped filesystems¹.
That's a bad situation (i.e. idiotic).
Does Haskell even support everything related to Unicode that we'd need?
Not now, but Haskell' jolly well ought to. Oh, and Haskell claims already to have unicode source files, but the compilers can't handle it.
I agree this ought to be rectified, but since I'm not volunteering to do it, I personally can't ensure its adoption. But I'll be cheerleader for it!
If the answers are satisfactory to all these questions, then Unicode is a good idea (and that's the ideal character).
Your answers seem very satisfactory to me. I guess it's a question of support / using Unicode in practice.
P.S. Plus that opens a lot of cans of worms for writing programs with all those fancy symbols! APL here we come!
It's a question of good style, isn't it? Using → instead of -> might be nice
This seems reasonable. Haskell already has a lot of carefully chosen graphical notation that actually aids in readability. As long as the old version of "→" i.e. "->" works, I don't see this as a problem. Although all the lexers for all tools and compilers would have to be updated. If it's a new backwards-incompatible standard (like Haskell 2), then this isn't a problem. For Haskell', since the compilers don't already support things well enough it sounds like, (i.e. Unicode everywhere with all its complexities, plus "->" + "→", etc.) then maybe this is beyond the scope of Haskell'. But I hope these sorts of important improvements occur sooner than later. (Once again I'm only cheerleading.)
but stringing together lots of arcane symbols like ₀∘°⁰ wouldn't be.
And that's where APL breaks down. I don't see Unicode allowing for any more abuse than the current DIY infix operator already does.
For Haskell 98 I argued against unicode, preferring that we should stick with ASCII, but nowadays a language that doesn't handle unicode properly is going to look shabby in a few years.
True. Thanks for the enlightenment. Jared. -- http://www.updike.org/~jared/ reverse ")-:"