Re: Ada self-referential operators

[pang@world.std.com]

In article <ROGOFF.95Feb8090424@sccm.Stanford.EDU>,
Brian Rogoff <rogoff@sccm.stanford.edu> wrote:
>John G. Volan writes:
>    I never cease to be amazed (and disgusted) at how enamored some people
>    in this industry seem to be about using arbitrary sequences of special
>    characters for just about everything under the sun.  Who says it's
>    *desirable* to load up a language with a lot of cryptic
>    "mathematicalese"?  Doesn't anyone remember how *hard* it was to learn
>    math, way back in grade school?
>
>In some problem domains it is very useful to have concise operators. 
>MATLAB, for example, even makes up new "YAFOs" to represent common 
>matrix manipulations. While I agree that overuse of special operators 
>could lead to highly unreadable code, tasteful use of such operators 
>makes reading math, and by extension, mathematical code, easier (IMO). 
>People could also choose bad names for functions and variables and make 
>code unreadable that way, yet I've never heard it suggested that we should 
>program in the untyped lambda calculus!

the problem is the keyboard/ascii character set. it's not rich/expressive
enough! 

what does it take to use symbol/graphics to represent operators and other 
language constructs/elements?