For beauty and understandability by non-programmers, lexers should
accept (not mandate) Unicode and alternative operator symbols,
and translate them to traditional ASCII symbols for parsing. It’s a
shame that modern programming languages can accept Unicode strings and
even variable names, but cannot accept more pleasant, clear, and correct
operator symbols.
This project presents corrected, alternative and subjectively-better
arithmetic, bitwise, logical, and relational operator symbols for the C
family and languages they influenced; encodes methods to use them before
languages accept them; and provide tips to type UTF-8 characters in
various environments (Plan 9).
We suggest the additional operator symbols − for subtract, × or ·
for multiply, ÷ for divide, ↥ for integer exponent, ↑ for real exponent,
∧ for bitwise and, ∨ for bitwise or, ⊻ for bitwise exclusive-or, ⋀ for
logical and, ⋁ for logical or, =? or ≟ for equal, ≠ for unequal, ≥ for
greater-than or equal, and ≤ for less-than or equal. (Expect this list
to expand.)
The methods presented either directly substitute characters in the
source text (stream-editor scripts for C, Go, Haskell, and Ruby),
preprocess the source text to substitute characters (cpp macros for C
and Haskell), modify a source-text formatter (gofmt) to accept
additional operators as traditional ASCII ones, or define additional
operators within the program source text (Haskell).