Unicode function names

Keith Hill has a fun blog post on using Unicode characters in PowerShell function names. Here’s an example from his article using the square root symbol for the square root function.

PS> function √($num) { [Math]::Sqrt($num) }
PS> √ 81

As Keith points out, these symbols are not practical since they’re difficult to enter, but they’re fun to play around with.

Here’s another example using the symbol for pounds sterling

for the function to convert British pounds to US dollars.

PS> function £($num) { 1.44*$num }
PS> £ 300.00

(As I write this, a British pound is worth $1.44 USD. If you wanted to get fancy, you could call a web service in your function to get the current exchange rate.)

I read once that someone (Larry Wall?) had semi-seriously suggested using the Japanese Yen currency symbol

for the “zip” function in Perl 6 since the symbol looks like a zipper.

Mathematica lets you use Greek letters as variable and function names, and it provides convenient ways to enter these characters, either graphically or via their TeX representations. I think this is a great idea. It could make mathematical source code much more readable. But I don’t use it because I’ve never got into the habit of doing so.

There are some dangers to allowing Unicode characters in programming languages. Because Unicode characters are semantic rather than visual, two characters may have the same graphical representation. Here are a couple examples. The Roman letter A (U+0041) and the capital Greek letter Α (U+0391) look the same but correspond to different characters. Also, the the Greek letter Ω (U+03A9) and the symbol Ω (U+2126) for Ohms (unit of electrical resistance) have the same visual representation but are different characters. (Or at least they may have the same visual representation. A font designer may choose, for example, to distinguish Omega and Ohm, but that’s not a concern to the Unicode Consortium.)

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