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0 pointsCJefferson5y ago0 comments

In undergrad lectures I constantly have students refering to "fork" or "curly n", or just misnaming different Greek letters (and, I find myself sometimes doing the same). The Greek is (to me) unnessary block to discussion.

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alexvoda5y ago

And greek letters and emoji have the same issue of dificult type-ability, non-ASCII-ness, dificult printability and dificult displayability. Emoji only add color.

The real solution is normal multicharacter names.

CJeffersonOP5y ago

I am happy for people to hate emoji, but I don't think non-ASCII-ness is a problem (lots of languages aren't in ASCII anywhere), and in general printing and displaying is easy -- it seems I can type emojis basically anywhere I can type anything else.

True, they don't display well in terminals, but I wouldn't not be willing to limit my maths to an ASCII monospaced terminal anyway, and that isn't how anyone writes or creates maths (unless they are typing LaTeX, in which case it will be nicely formatted anyway). I want super/sub scripts.

alexvoda5y ago

The reason I mentioned non-ASCII-ness is because top-parent mentioned them:

> Yeah, no. Please don't do this. This has been discussed previously w.r.t commit messages, and I'd argue that the reasons for not doing so with maths are largely the same: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21760021

CJeffersonOP5y ago

I'm sorry, I don't buy any of those reasons.

emoji are perfectly usable by screen readers -- if we really wanted to help people with screen readers we would move on from unstructured terminal output and programs which just dump screens of data. You know that thing that sometimes happens when a program running in the background outputs to the terminal -- that REALLY messes up screen readers.

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alexvoda5y ago

And greek letters and emoji have the same issue of dificult type-ability, non-ASCII-ness, dificult printability and dificult displayability. Emoji only add color.

The real solution is normal multicharacter names.

CJeffersonOP5y ago

alexvoda5y ago

The reason I mentioned non-ASCII-ness is because top-parent mentioned them:

CJeffersonOP5y ago

I'm sorry, I don't buy any of those reasons.

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