Re: if vs. when vs. and: style question

["Óscar Fuentes" <ofv@wanadoo.es>]

Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> writes:

[snip]

>> Precisely, my experience is that Unicode makes things much harder to
>> read, and not ony because the problem mentioned above.
>
> What other problems would you point out in this regard?

Derivations of the case you mentioned on your reply to me. Essentially
you are bound to a font if you want to ensure readability. When you
publish a book or a paper it is natural to select the most convenient
font. However, it is not so natural to state "the source code contained
on this file is best read with DejaVu Sans Mono, Caveat Emptor".

In general, applying the rules of publishing to source code produces
nice results on the terminal of the code writer, but surprises
elsewhere.

Another issue is related to what Pascal Bourguignon mentions, and my
reply to Stefan: the abundance of symbols adds mental strain.
Furthermore, using shorter textual representations for objects makes the
code almost cryptic, moreso when such representations uses symbols taken
from a large pool. That's my experience and, IIRC, there are studies
that back that impression. The usual advice about descriptive names and
self-documenting code applies.

Then we have the community problem: you are adding a whole new set of
requirements to everyone who needs to work with your code. They must use
certain fonts, with certain editors, then learn the conventions about
the used/acceptable symbols... This opens a whole new world of
opportunities for bikeshedding :-)

OTOH, inputting the symbols, which seems to be a hot topic on this
thread, was no problem, by my tolerance thresholds.