Non-ascii alternative operator symbols

[michaelhkay]

Appendix B.3 of the draft specification proposes that we provide non-ASCII synonyms for many of the operator symbols:

Operator	Symbol	Codepoint
and	∧	x2227
or	∨	x2228
eq	≐	x2250
ne	≠	x2260
lt	⋖	x22D6
gt	⋗	x22D7
le	≤	x2264
ge	≥	x2265
div	÷	xF7
mod
idiv	⨸	x2A38
union (|)	∪	x222A
intersect	∩	x2229
except	∖	x2216
is	≡	x2261
<< (precedes)	≪	x226A
>> (follows)	≫	x226B
otherwise	⊩	x22A9
some	∃	x2203
every	∀	x2200
satisfies	⧴	x29F4

This issue is raised to enable discussion of this proposal.

I have to confess I'm going rather cool on the idea. Some of the proposed symbols are rather obscure, and they aren't always rendered very clearly on display; some can easily be confused with other symbols. It's going to take a lot of WG time to agree the details, and it will probably cause more usability problems than it solves.

I've always felt that it was high time for programming to break loose from ASCII, but there are probably good reasons it hasn't done so.

The fact that we have two sets of comparison operators (and that some of the symbols clash with XML reserved characters) doesn't help. Providing alternative ways of writing them can only add to the confusion.

I'm going to propose dropping this unless someone else wants to champion it.

[ChristianGruen]

I’m also referencing #126, in which some suggestions and concerns on the extensions were discussed.

@michaelhkay I share your concerns. It’s still a challenge on most keyboards to type in arbitrary Unicode characters, and we should avoid getting people to copy and paste single characters all the time. In addition, most operators are compact enough, so we don’t save much space by switching to single characters. Finally, @davidcarlisle indicated in
#126 that NFD normalization could result in incorrect code.

[ChristianGruen]

Some concerns have been raised (in #126, among others) about offering Unicode symbols for mathematical operators in the specification. If no one is fond of keeping the symbols, we could…

1. Drop the feature from the current spec: https://qt4cg.org/specifications/xquery-40/xpath-40.html#id-math-symbols
2. Close this issue and #30.

[ChristianGruen]

Now that #460 was created, do we want to keep this open?

[ChristianGruen]

#460 was closed, I’m closing this one as well.