I know. They are not letters.

It's an academic difference though. No reason why a language couldn't include them for whatever purpose it wants. In fact, because they are not part of any existing words, it makes it easy to grab them to use for some hot-wired specific purpose, like a single-character constant.

I have a dim memory of musing over that with the Perl6 people, as characters for constants or as part of user-defined operators were often classified wrong for the intended purpose. So it needs a way to specify, lexically, such a classification as well.

A source filter could easily expand odd characters into something else, such as a legal identifier name. Because they are abnormal, it stands a good chance of not messing up the rest of the file as filters are wont to do.

It would be interesting to see if anyone could get it to compile in 5.14 without a source filter. Perhaps munging the unicode database, perhaps other tricks I don't know about, perhaps some combination of overloads and other junk.

In reply to Re^3: anyway to make this look better by John M. Dlugosz
in thread anyway to make this look better by vboy1997

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.