Posted Jan 1, 2024 11:31 UTC (Mon) by ianmcc (subscriber, #88379)
Parent article: Julia 1.10 released
Well, although in general I'm all for having a few unicode characters for more expressive operators, I hope I never see any code that contains ⥺ or ⥷. I've never seen those symbols before, and google isn't much help - the top hit for '\leftarrowsubset' is this LWN article! Even looking at the rest of the google results there is nothing useful, the only hits are tables of unicode symbols.
Posted Jan 1, 2024 11:33 UTC (Mon) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (4 responses) Should be easier to grep for or Google for than an operator like ++Julia 1.10 released
Posted Jan 1, 2024 13:21 UTC (Mon) by ianmcc (subscriber, #88379) [Link] (3 responses) I'm not sure that is a good example, the only occurrences of ++ I can find in text files on my hard drives are code where it stands for operator++. Did you mean something else? I agree it would be easier to google, the first person to use it in a publicly searchable Julia code will get the top hit! Posted Jan 1, 2024 13:55 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] Not that I can program APL, but it would be fun to get some AI to try and program in that ... Cheers, Posted Jan 2, 2024 11:06 UTC (Tue) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (1 responses) Yes, that's what I meant. ++ is an operator in many languages but not easy to search for (mainly because + has a special meaning in search engines and in regexp syntax). A bizarre Unicode squiggle is hard to type on the keyboard, but you can cut and paste it, and your editor should have no trouble letting you select it and "jump to definition" or whatever. (There are editors which display fancy Unicode glyphs to replace ++, <= and other multi-character operators.) Posted Jan 3, 2024 6:59 UTC (Wed) by tbleher (guest, #48307) [Link] > ++ is an operator in many languages but not easy to search for (mainly because + has a special meaning in search engines and in regexp syntax). That's one place where I found tools like ChatGPT really useful, since they can handle all these tokens. But even Google has gotten much better here, e.g. asking for 'What does ++ mean in C++?', both Google and ChatGPT correctly return info about the increment operator. I found this impressive, given that ++ is also contained inside the string "C++". Asking for 'What is "++" inside the name "C++"?' instead, both tools correctly give info about the origin of the name "C++".Julia 1.10 released
Julia 1.10 released
WolJulia 1.10 released
Julia 1.10 released
Julia 1.10 released
Posted Jan 1, 2024 17:07 UTC (Mon) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]
They're a composition of a left arrow and a relational (comparison) operator, which is a bit confusing to me. Some languages use left arrow as the assignment operator, so you could try to interpret it as an augmented assignment (i.e. analogous to += or the like), but the problem with that is that relational operators should return bool, not the type of the input.
The only thing I can think of is that these are used to spell some kind of relational algebra expression, and you don't want to use the standard notation (with Greek letters) because it requires predicates-as-values. For example, a selection is traditionally spelled σ_φ(R), where φ is some arbitrary predicate and R is the relation (table), but if you ultimately want to transform the whole thing into an SQL SELECT statement, you have to be able to take φ apart and turn it into a WHERE clause. This means that φ cannot just be e.g. a lambda that returns bool - you can't put a lambda in a WHERE clause. So you might end up writing something like R.x⥷5, which is semantically equivalent to SELECT * FROM R WHERE x < 5, and assigning the result to R, but lazy (i.e. this is a query-builder syntax, not a syntax that eagerly runs off to the database and actually does the selection). Similarly, ⥺ might represent an IN operation in the WHERE clause.
I have no idea if this is the intended use case (or indeed if there is an intended use case), but it does not seem completely ridiculous to my mind.
![Julia 1.10 released [LWN.net] (2024)](data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAEAAAABCAQAAAC1HAwCAAAAC0lEQVR42mP8/h8AAvMB+NzmkbcAAAAASUVORK5CYII=)