On 25/01/2024 21:18, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
The compose key on *nix systems gives you a fairly mnemonic way ofIt lets you type some, but it is still limited in the default setup.
typing many of them.
It's very useful for things like diacriticals on letters that you
already have, but if you want to use it for something out of the
ordinary, you need to make your own .XCompose file.
And it's easy to have different symbols that appear quite similar as
glyphs, but are very different characters as far as the compiler is
concerned.
You can actually take advantage of that. E.g. from some of my Python
code:
for cłass in (Window, Pixmap, Cursor, GContext, Region) :
delattr(cłass, "__del__")
#end for
The human reader might not actually notice (or care) that a particular
identifier looks like a reserved word, since the meaning is obvious
from context. The compiler cannot deduce the meaning from that context,
but then, it doesn’t need to.
I am not at all keen on that. I am not against using non-ASCII letters
as though they were special symbols for particular purposes, but I'd
want them to stand out clearly.
On Fri, 26 Jan 2024 15:59:11 +0100, David Brown wrote:
On 25/01/2024 21:18, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
The compose key on *nix systems gives you a fairly mnemonic way ofIt lets you type some, but it is still limited in the default setup.
typing many of them.
The default keys come from /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose,
which on my system contains something like 5000 entries.
It's very useful for things like diacriticals on letters that you
already have, but if you want to use it for something out of the
ordinary, you need to make your own .XCompose file.
Works fine for things like curly quotes “‘’”, em-dashes—, arithmetic
operators ×÷, some subscripts and superscripts ₉₂U²³⁹, arrows ←↑→↓.
I have a small number of entries in my .XCompose, because I don’t want to have to remember too many customizations.
For less-commonly-used things, I go to an Emacs editor window and use its ability to enter characters by their Unicode names, then copy and paste
from there.
And it's easy to have different symbols that appear quite similar as
glyphs, but are very different characters as far as the compiler is
concerned.
You can actually take advantage of that. E.g. from some of my Python
code:
for cłass in (Window, Pixmap, Cursor, GContext, Region) :
delattr(cłass, "__del__")
#end for
The human reader might not actually notice (or care) that a particular
identifier looks like a reserved word, since the meaning is obvious
from context. The compiler cannot deduce the meaning from that context,
but then, it doesn’t need to.
I am not at all keen on that. I am not against using non-ASCII letters
as though they were special symbols for particular purposes, but I'd
want them to stand out clearly.
The whole point about this example is that they do not need to “stand out clearly”.
On 26/01/2024 22:22, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
The default keys come from /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose,
which on my system contains something like 5000 entries.
But most of these cannot be typed (by most people), because the
combinations include things like dead keys that they don't have, or
letters or keys that are from other keyboard layouts.
Sysop: | Keyop |
---|---|
Location: | Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, UK |
Users: | 299 |
Nodes: | 16 (3 / 13) |
Uptime: | 51:29:13 |
Calls: | 6,690 |
Calls today: | 8 |
Files: | 12,225 |
Messages: | 5,344,713 |
Posted today: | 1 |