Discussion shifts to alternative keyword marking: boldface
5 Sep 22 4:09 PM · 1d ago · 5 comments · 1 source · development 5 of 7
A commenter proposes using Unicode boldface characters for keywords—a visual distinction from the 1960s Algol standard—as a more aesthetic alternative to sigils. A follow-up questions the practical barriers to entering and displaying such characters cross-platform.
“Algol 60 and Algol 68 had boldface keywords, which look great. In the 1960's, there were no affordable hi res graphics displays and no affordable hi res graphics printers, so nobody implemented the language that way AFAIK. Now we have cheap hi res graphics, and the Unicode standard has upper and lower case latin letters in boldface. So there's not much of a barrier to using boldface keywords today.”
doug-moenBlog author Programming language designer/writer
The whole story postscomments the bright band is this development · numbered dots are the others · click one to jump
What people said 5 voices · verbatim
-
> the Unicode standard has upper and lower case latin letters in boldface. So there's not much of a barrier to using boldface keywords today. What method of *entering* Unicode mathematical boldface characters do you use that you consider "not much of a barrier"? Furthermore, is this method available cross-platform? Is it available without an IDE?
-
> Indented multiline strings While I'm glad to see "hey, you want multiline strings to be on the same indentation level as the rest of your program" mentioned, I don't actually think the mentioned languages do this particularly well. [From the Lix documentation:](https://docs.lix.systems/manual/lix/stable/language/values.html#type-string) > This…
-
Indeed, I am thinking of s-expressions. In general, I think syntax beyond s-expressions is pointless. True lisp curmudgeon here. I actually find the idea of treating them as whitespace almost as aesthetically offensive. I just don't see the point of ambiguous or free syntactic constructs, although in the case of whitespace the alternative may be…
-
Its a wart on top of a wart, in my opinion, and absurd. A comma means "more follows" and I find the idea of corrupting its meaning out of laziness truly difficult to accept. Obviously in the grand scheme of things its nothing and I'm being melodramatic, but it really, really rubs me the wrong way.
-
Isn't this more just a flavor of syntax highlighting... aka a display and typesetting convention? Or do you actually propose this as a syntactic rule? And to what end? I guess it namespaces keywords and identifiers separately... which in theory is nice, but I kind of wonder how much actual value it provides.
All 7 developments of Blog post on programming language design principles gains… →
LobstersHacker News