perl6 Atomic Fission

I have been listening to the reaction on the web to the incorporation of an emoji as a unicode symbol in perl6 rakudo. Here’s a flavour…

• my $a = ⚛$var (aka my $a = atomic-fetch($var))
• $var⚛++ (aka atomic-fetch-inc($var))

(https://p6weekly.wordpress.com/2017/08/21/2017-34-going-atomic/ )

The rationale for the use of unicode symbols is as follows:

• These represent operations that are rare
• They relate to a specific domain (in this case, concurrency)
• Programmers can always fall back on the ASCII version (e.g. atomic-inc )

BTW- ASCII versions are known as Texas versions since they are always bigger

Certainly this has caused some consternation – ranging from how can I type ⚛️ on my keyboard (hit CTRL-CMD-SPACE if you are on macOS ) to this will never be accepted for the coding standards of my company.

On reflection, while it is understandable that programmers have a well established comfort zone of ASCII text and using English for keywords, I think that perl6 is leading the way on an irresistible path. Of the 6.5bn people on the planet, only a small fraction prefer to work in English – or even in Latin alphabets. Now, the pioneering work to embed unicode in a programming language will open the doors to all kinds of invention. What about:

• A slang (i.e. a perl6 sublanguage) for the French, Germans or Japanese programmer
• Ability to parse all unicode alphabets – so linguists can digitize,  analyze and compose writing from all parts of the globe, even dead scripts like Egyptian
• Or, back to the point, opening a new world of symbol space to side step the crammed ASCII non alphanumeric characters that confines our programming

And this, in combination with perl6 Grammars, opens some interesting conceptual doors.

~p6steve

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