Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

No, we dont because non-keyboard symbols are irritating to type. Look at the history of APL and other symbol based languages.

In any case, the computer doesn't care. It is either a character or something similar stored as binary representing part of an instruction to be compiled into other binary.

I have seen a few proposals for creating languages which are exclusively stored as a generic AST, sufficiently abstract that it can be edited in any variety of "languages" in a capable editor, then stored back into the AST. I havent seen a good proposal for making that actually workable, however. It sounds a bit like storing code as the output from LLVM then expecting an editor to be able to open it as C# or JavaScript or Lisp.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: