Larry mused: > But we also have the ambiguity with <<'' and friends, so maybe the real > problem is trying to make the << and >> workarounds look too much like > � and �. Maybe they should be :<< and :>> or some such. Maybe we > should be thinking about a more general trigraph (shudder) policy. Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!! ;-) > Or some other kind of "entity" policy. Though I don't think people > would be terribly pleased when they see things like: > > @a »+<<« @b Agreed! > Particularly since the "r" one goes on the left, and the "l" on goes > on the right. Still, it's potentially a lot less ambiguous, and puts > people into the "preprocessing" frame of mind, and would certainly > motivate people to move toward editors and terminals that can display: > > @a �+<<� @b Yes, it would be an excellent motivation in that direction. But, then, so would *not* providing any ASCII-based alternative in the first place. > And we wouldn't have to define yet another arbitrary list of mappings. Here, here! I certainly believe that any entity notation must use the "standard" (i.e. HTML and/or Unicode) names for entities. > On the other hand, we'd probably have to require a () on the &foo() > notation to distinguish it from an &foo; entity. Which would seem to suggest that the Huffman coding is backwards. I expect to use constructs like: my Code $clocks_ref = × far more often than I'd use something like: my Vector $outer = $vec1 × $vec2; especially since I'm already using an OS that makes it trivial to code the latter "properly": my Vector $outer = $vec1 � $vec2; Frankly, I'd *much* rather see: @sum = @a E<raquo>+<<E<laquo> @b; my Vector $outer = $vec1 E<times> $vec2; which at least has the benefit of being consistent with POD notation. (Note that, if we *do* decide to support some kind of ASCII-based entity notation, we really must make sure it's the same in both Perl code and POD mark-up.) DamianThread Previous | Thread Next