comment on

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.

In reply to Re^6: Why should any one use/learn Perl 6? by haj
in thread Why should any one use/learn Perl 6? by skooma

Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>
Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.


There's more than one way to do things
	PerlMonks