All,

 

               Tom Honermann encouraged me to share with you several ideas that at some point in the future may become proposable.

 

First is the ↑ character (Alt-24 with NumLock on). We had a discussion a while back with Bjarne and a few other C++ luminaries in regards to a possible exponentiation operator. None of the more conventional alternatives appeared to be a good candidate, while ↑ is a symbol used for that purpose by Donald Knuth, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth%27s_up-arrow_notation, and would be excellent for readability. Perhaps we can add it at some point to the basic character set. I am not at all worried about its absence on the keyboard, math folks will quickly get used to Alt-24.

 

I would imagine the right approach for this to happen is to ask ourselves: what is are the specific characters that we wish were in the basic character set? My initial list would be: $,@,↑,• or ·,÷ . $ is already in Microsoft basic character set, see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/cpp/character-sets?view=vs-2019, so perhaps this would be a low-hanging fruit. The middle dot symbol and the obelus could be used as an alternative multiplication and division operators. Swift already has user-defined operators; if we ever get them, it would be awesome to have something like

 

long long operator ·(long m, long n) { return (long long)m * (long long)n; }

 

The second, far more impactful idea would be to unicodize the entire language and let the users use keywords in their national languages. Programmers outside USA (surprise, surprise) often think in their native languages and often prefer to write comments in them. For example, I know that the SAP codebase is full of comments in German. A source file is a specialized text, and every language switch is a disorienting experience, especially if these languages are not related. Algol 68 designers already understood this and translated the language into Russian, German, French, Bulgarian, Chinese and Japanese, including of course the keywords. This could facilitate teaching/studying the language as well.

As an illustration, let us consider 3 variants of Hello-World, first the canonic version with comments, second with the same comments in Russian and third a hypothetical Hello world/Привет мир in C++ with Russian keywords:

 

­­­­­­­­­­

//This is needed for printf

#include <stdio.h>

 

//Program entry

int main()

{

   //Let's greet the world

   printf("Hello world!\n");

}

 

 

//Это требуется для printf

#include <stdio.h>

 

//Вход в программу

int main()

{

   //Приветствуем мир

   printf("Привет мир!\n");