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by alexvoda 2039 days ago
The reason I mentioned non-ASCII-ness is because top-parent mentioned them:

> Yeah, no. Please don't do this. This has been discussed previously w.r.t commit messages, and I'd argue that the reasons for not doing so with maths are largely the same: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21760021
1 comments
CJefferson 2039 days ago
I'm sorry, I don't buy any of those reasons.

emoji are perfectly usable by screen readers -- if we really wanted to help people with screen readers we would move on from unstructured terminal output and programs which just dump screens of data. You know that thing that sometimes happens when a program running in the background outputs to the terminal -- that REALLY messes up screen readers.

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alexvoda 2039 days ago
Fair enough. We should make sure software including screen readers properly support Unicode in a useful way. Lack of support in the present is not a reason to avoid emoji. And math notation is already very non-ASCII so arguments related to plain text mode debugging are not applicable. There is probably an argument to be made about color blindness.

But overall my argument is that emoji are not a solution to the problem of very limited naming options for things in math, lack of significance of the symbol used and that of homonymity . The solution is using words. And those words may contain Unicode characters. And alias longer names to symbols on case by case basis.

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