van Vliet use of backquote (and backslash)

[chris hermansen]

Good evening all

I noticed tonight while poring through van Vliet's transput code that he
appropriates the backquote as "plus_i_times", as part of his defining sets
of characters to be used in transput formatting conversion:

CharBag {ℵ₀} radix10digit = STRINGTOBAG "0123456789",
        {ℵ₀} radix_2digit = STRINGTOBAG "01",
        {ℵ₀} radix_4digit = STRINGTOBAG "0123",
        {ℵ₀} radix_8digit = STRINGTOBAG "01234567",
        {ℵ₀} radix16digit = STRINGTOBAG "0123456789abcedf",
        {ℵ₀} time_ten_to_the_power = STRINGTOBAG "\eE",
        {ℵ₀} flipflop               = STRINGTOBAG (flip + flop),
        {ℵ₀} plus_i_times           = STRINGTOBAG "`iI",
        {ℵ₀} signspace              = STRINGTOBAG "+- ",
        {ℵ₀} plusminus              = STRINGTOBAG "+-",
        {ℵ₀} point                  = STRINGTOBAG string("."),
        {ℵ₀} xylpkq                 = STRINGTOBAG "xylpkq";

His CharBag type above is like a Java HashSet<Character> and the
STRINGTOBAG operator converts a string to a CharBag instance.

This is the only place it appears in the code but of course the name
plus_i_times appears in a few places...

I'm thinking that, given the earlier discussion about whether or not
backquote could be usurped for some other use, maybe better to nip this one
in the bud...

The eagle-eyed reader who has yet to fall asleep reading this will also
note that van Vliet has proposed using the backslash as an alternative for
time_ten_to_the_power... which maybe also should be discouraged.

-- 
Chris Hermansen · clhermansen "at" gmail "dot" com

C'est ma façon de parler.
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