Re: Communications of ACM: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33!

[Jacob Sparre Andersen <sparre@nbi.dk>]

Michael R wrote:

> There's a note in November's Communications of the ACM titled "Sir,
> Please Step Away from the ASR-33!" with the sub-title "To move forward
> with programming languages we must first break free from the tyranny
> of ASCII".
>
> It's interesting that Ada has already stepped away from ASCII. Many of
> the test cases for my ZanyBlue.Text localization support library
> contain non-ASCII source, e.g., a test enumeration with identifiers
> containing Greek characters:

This is definitely a small step in the right direction.  But I don't
think it is anywhere as far at Poul-Henning Kamp would like it to go.  I
have the impression that as long as our source files are only defined as
a sequence of characters, we aren't there yet.  I'm a bit scared by the
thought of a source code being defined both at the file level (for
compatibility) and as a 2D (3D?) visual structure (for editing and
inspection).

Greetings,

Jacob
-- 
"Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen."