But anyway, I still think they're not worth loosing an ASCII character, and using mathematical notation would be very useful. It would make code readable by people a little aware of mathematics. That is, most programers. It would be definitely better than arbitrary characters.
Why should we restrict to ASCII anyway ? I mean, a lot of symbols I use are not ASCII anymore (they are accentuated, I'm French so something like 'year is translated into 'année, not into 'annee). Sure, they're hard to type, but are they any longer than they symbol counterpart ? If you type them often, just make them a vi macro (or whatever in your favorite text editor) and you're done.
It might end up looking like APL, for sure, but I think Fortress, Sun's new language designed by Guy Steele, is going that way too. And Steele cannot be wrong :)
I don't mind non-ASCII, I mind weird non-ASCII. Even in English, we leave ASCII behind: “As I was going to the café—what fun—my naïve friend said…” It's just that I don't know of any keyboard layout that supports ∧ or ∨. I agree that they would look great, as would Fortress.
I wonder if anyone's given any though to using (La)TeX in a language? So that something like (number{\wedge}acons var) would be the same as (number∨acons var)? Or just as a nice way of typing things like Fortress? (Which I agree looks very interesting.)
I'd probably use them a lot more often if the syntax was a little easier, which is why I suggested using ssyntax for them. Currently the syntax is ((orf this that the-other) foo), and doubled starting parens feel rather strange to me.
