Color sensitivity? No, BUT....

[Stephen Uitti]

In article <1265 at l.cc.purdue.edu> cik at l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes:
>> And then again, having fonts be significant in variable names would make
>> it easy to have variables like "script-G" that pop up in Quantum Mechanics...
>> (No, I am NOT serious.  :-)
>
>Why not?  Mathematicians have been using fonts and foreign alphabets for
>hundreds of years without confusion.  Just because at some stage in the
>development of computers only punch card symbols were available, and at
>the present time there is this atrocious attempt to limit us to the 63
>characters which the 7-bit ASCII handles, we should give this up?  We know
>how to use escape characters for those channels which are so limited.

Mathematicians have not been doing this without confusion.  This
is a myth.  It is probably built on some sort of industry-wide
self-feeding ego trip.  APL required all sorts of odd looking
symbols.  It was a nightmare.  Write only programming.

Seven bit ASCII has more than 63 printable characters.  (2 ** 7)
= 128.  Seven bit ASCII is fine for programming (in english, as
used in the states).  If anything, it is too rich a character
set.  Fancy fonts and graphics should live in the documentation.

In any case, with any kind of luck, i won't have to debug your code.

Stephen.