This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz
by Daniel Berger.
Original Post: Is QWERTY harming language design?
Feed Title: Testing 1,2,3...
Feed URL: http://djberg96.livejournal.com/data/rss
Feed Description: A blog on Ruby and other stuff.
After doing a quick overview of the Fortress language, I started to wonder something. Are language designers too limited in their decisions about syntax because of the limitations of the QWERTY keyboard?
Larry Wall's first rule of computer language design is, "Everybody wants the colon". Maybe the problem is that we just don't have enough symbols on our damned keyboards, and so we're left fighting over the scraps that QWERTY gives us, i.e. the colon. It limits our thinking and our expressiveness.
One of the (many) ways that the Fortress folks have broken with programming language tradition is that a Fortress program understands several Unicode code points. For example, instead of '==', you use '���' (U+2261), '���' (U+2265) instead of '>=', etc.
Maybe it's time that we accepted the fact that programmers need a different keyboard from your average, non-programming computer user. Another row of keys above the current QWERTY keyboard, with two characters per key, gives us another 30+ code points. With these at our disposal, language designers can then write grammars & parsers that actually use these characters.
I wonder if I can find something like this online...
Previous Topic
