>> The best thing about using only ASCII for the main syntax is that everyone can type it with their keyboard.
Well, some keyboard layouts make it harder though. I have spent a considerable amount of time trying to teach programming constructs over Zoom to budding developers in Japan over the past two years. The placement, access mode, and actual typing of characters such as `{`, `$`, `~`, `|`, `:` etc has been the biggest stumbling block during these sessions.
So, there the subset of ASCII that is equally easy to type on all keyboards is smaller than the full range of non-control characters.
> But "everyone" doesn't have the same keyboard nor does everyone speak the same language.
I like that Vim's digraph feature lets me solve the problem in my editor without having to rely on the keyboard layout or OS level preferences. So, typing these lines:
my $μ = "İstanbul'da hava çok güzelmiş";
say uc($μ);
takes the exact same keystrokes regardless of the OS/environment I am in:
m y CTRL-K m * = "CTRL-K \ I s t a
On my own machines, this has the advantage of not having to switch languages in the act of typing (although Win+SPACE is pretty easy on Windows, cycling through the five I have installed is not trivial). And, do I really remember where ø is on the Danish keyboard as opposed to where ö is on the Turkish keyboard?
Well, some keyboard layouts make it harder though. I have spent a considerable amount of time trying to teach programming constructs over Zoom to budding developers in Japan over the past two years. The placement, access mode, and actual typing of characters such as `{`, `$`, `~`, `|`, `:` etc has been the biggest stumbling block during these sessions.
So, there the subset of ASCII that is equally easy to type on all keyboards is smaller than the full range of non-control characters.
> But "everyone" doesn't have the same keyboard nor does everyone speak the same language.
I like that Vim's digraph feature lets me solve the problem in my editor without having to rely on the keyboard layout or OS level preferences. So, typing these lines:
takes the exact same keystrokes regardless of the OS/environment I am in: On my own machines, this has the advantage of not having to switch languages in the act of typing (although Win+SPACE is pretty easy on Windows, cycling through the five I have installed is not trivial). And, do I really remember where ø is on the Danish keyboard as opposed to where ö is on the Turkish keyboard?