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Talk:Unicode variable names: Difference between revisions
→The wrong triangle: semi-random thoughts from a language design point of view
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I first found \xa2\xa4 U+25b3, and put this one in my program. I know enough of the Greek alphabet to wonder why my Greek delta was not with other Greek letters in the table. So I checked the EUC-JP Kanji Code Table again, and found the uppercase Greek alphabet in a different part of the table. This is when I switched to \xa6\xa4 U+0394. But △ U+25b3 and Δ U+0394 look so alike, I still confuse them. --[[User:Kernigh|Kernigh]] 03:00, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
:That's really fascinating from a language design point of view. The problem of visual confusion is, of course, always going to occur when you try to cram too many codepoints into too few pixels. There are a few things to be said, though. First, choosing an appropriate font to the task can help. I wish the Unicode Consortium's fonts were a bit more available, since they often try to maintain at least some subtle distinctions between similar glyphs. This situation will likely improve somewhat over time. Second, this is a really good argument for domain-specific subsetting of codepoint repertoires. I'm not talking about reverting to ASCII, but rather contextual sanity checks. For instance, in Perl 6, identifiers cannot contain △, U+25B3 WHITE UP-POINTING TRIANGLE, because only alphanumerics (including ideographs) are allowed there. Third, since substituting △ for Δ is really in the category of a typo, it's also a good argument for explicit declaration of new identifiers, a spot that Ruby is arguably a bit weak on...at least from my perspective. <tt>:-)</tt> --[[User:TimToady|TimToady]] 19:05, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
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