Re: ¬ notation for not? Ref: Add a couple cells to lisp-prettify-symbols-alist

[Mark Oteiza <mvoteiza@udel.edu>]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:
>> Part of the inspiration for adding more things to some modes has been
>> that of the p-s-alist in tuareg.el:
>> https://github.com/ocaml/tuareg/blob/master/tuareg.el#L468
>
> FWIW, I don't much like the new "not" and "sqrt" thingies either, tho
> I wasn't bothered enough to turn them off either, so I can clearly live
> with them.
>
> I like ¬ in tuareg-mode, OTOH.  Not sure exactly why my reaction is
> different in those two cases.  Maybe the parentheses make a difference,
> or maybe it's the tradition to use longish names (and hence indent
> differently) in Lisp vs the tradition to use shortish names in ML?

I'd have to agree that it all looks better in ML

>> In any case, I don't feel strongly about it.  One thing I just thought
>> of is making a mode's foo-prettify-symbols-alist a defcustom--perhaps
>> that will be nicer.
>
> There's a clear need for some customization, indeed.  There isn't any
> right now partly because I couldn't come up with a good idea (e.g. the
> format of prettify-symbols-alist is likely to be extended in ways which
> are inconvenient for an end-user, and if the end-user customizes his
> var he won't benefit from later improved defaults).
>
> At some point I was tempted to add a `prettify-symbols-inhibit` which
> would contain a list of chars.  E.g. I'd personally put √ globally in
> that list.

Perhaps doing it how calc manages its units would be satisfactory?  The
short of it being that `math-standard-units' and user-defined
`math-additional-units' are used to build `math-units-table'.  Though,
for units there isn't a need to blacklist, and it sounds like a good
option to have for prettify-symbols.