haj: ...why I don't like these unicode operators: I have no idea how to enter it into my keyboard easily...
liz: FWIW, those characters live in my TouchBar on my MacBook Pro.
So, should I hop over to the Netherlands and let you type the character or steal your MacBook Pro instead?
I apologize for mocking you. This is going off-topic towards Unicode fine-print.
I now know that some browsers don't even show the difference between the characters in question.
What appears in your article is a ⚛️ character, which is not what you want to use in code. The difference between "⚛️" and "⚛" is that the former is one character composed of two codepoints: The atom symbol, U+269B, and the "VARIATION SELECTOR-16", U+FE0F. U+FEOF is a zero-width symbol which enforces emoji-style display for the preceding character. In Perl 6, "⚛️".chars is 1 and "⚛️".codes is 2.
The correct character to be used in prefix ++⚛ is the plain atom symbol U+269B. In Perl 6, "⚛".chars is 1 and "⚛".codes is also 1.
liz: That's not really a Perl 6 problem. I would say then that your preferred editor will have more and more problems surviving in a more and more unicodey world.
In the past, one could create nasty Perl 6 code by assigning operators to zero-width symbols, but as far as I know this is no longer possible, so I agree, it is no longer a Perl 6 problem. On the other hand, I am actually really, really happy that my editor did display the atom symbol (for which it has a glyph) and the zero-width symbol (for which it displays a "FE0F" surrogate glyph) as two separate entities, so it was rather obvious why Perl 6 complained about a "Bogus postfix".
For fun, try to type the following into a Perl 6 interactive shell, or feed it into the Perl 6 chat. Try to figure out which of the two fails before you paste it (Looking at the page source is considered cheating):
- my atomicint $a = 1; $a⚛++; say $a
- my atomicint $a = 1; $a⚛️++; say $a
I am in awe about the depth of Unicode support in Perl 6, as far as data are concerned. But I am not so happy about its use in code.
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