[Chris_Newton]

Usually the ligatures in these fonts are designed to fill the same width as the original combination of separate characters in monospace use. That does preserve the alignment of code to either side of the ligature, but unfortunately at the expense of either making some of the symbols much wider than normal or adding a lot of extra whitespace to pad them out. For programming, the ligatured version seems quite risky if it means the only visual difference between single and double equals or underscore characters is a bit of width and/or horizontal padding.

What I would like to try is a language where = actually meant equality rather than assignment and a few other common operators like !=, ===, !==, <= and >= all appeared using the standard mathematical symbols at the same width as =, < and >. That way, some related cases would naturally line up and most lines with comparisons would become shorter and less cluttered, which seems like a modest incremental improvement in language syntax. Alas, you’d also need software and keyboard input to support that in a way that made those alternative symbols effortless and entirely predicable to use. This feels like a job for a standardised programmer’s keyboard and AltGr, except that you’d need a standardised programmer’s keyboard for each of the different languages that already uses AltGr for other purposes, and at some point it all becomes more trouble than it’s worth.