[Haskell-cafe] Language simplicity

[Tom Tobin]

On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 1:28 PM, Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH
<allbery at ece.cmu.edu> wrote:
> On Jan 13, 2010, at 14:25 , Andrew Coppin wrote:
>> (And even if that's not the case, I've yet to find a way to type in the
>> Unicode characters which are hypothetically possible.)
>
> That's a problem with your editor/development environment.

It's not just one's editor (I use emacs, and it's actually not that
hard to type a decent subset of interesting Unicode characters in
emacs with the tex input mode), but readability.  The ASCII characters
are universal and easily recognized (assuming you have a decent
monochrome font); having to notice potentially significant differences
involving diacritics alone (not to mention all the various
mathematical symbols) in identifiers would drive me mad.  It's the
same reason we try to limit lines of code to ~80 characters — our
editors are *capable* of more, sure, but are we?