Short representation for LWB and UPB

[chris hermansen]

Thanks Jose

On Sat, Feb 21, 2026, 16:47 Jose E. Marchesi <jemarch@gnu.org> wrote:

>
> > I'm drawing a Saturday afternoon blank here but what do we use ? for in
> > Algol68?
> >
> > As a graphic device I like ?[ for LWB and ?] for UPB (ir something
> > similar), the ? hinting at "query"
>
> ? is a monad, so its ok.
>
> But we cannot use [ and ].  These are worthy but not nomads.
>
> I personally like <<a and >>b.
>
> But ?<a and ?>b would be possible as well...
>

I would like to see << for left shift and >> for right shift, but that
doesn't mean they could not also be used for lower and upper bound.

But I do like seeing a ? when there is a query-ish thing happening.

I like ?< and ?> as the <> hint at left and right bracket respectively
(moreso than / and \ for me at least), and they are symmetric.

I am also somewhat in favour of expanding the worthy characters, monads and
nomads to include other Unicode symbols that can be readily accessed with
the compose key, but I believe I am in the minority on this topic... There
are just so many interesting characters there, many of which have been
adopted for mathematical descriptions of algorithms...



> >
> > On Sat, Feb 21, 2026, 16:24 Jose E. Marchesi <jemarch@gnu.org> wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> Hello people!
> >>
> >> I am thinking about a potential shorter representation of the UPB and
> >> LWB operators monadic and dyadic operators on rows.
> >>
> >> In SUPPER stropping in many (most?) cases both LWB and UPB require at
> >> least five characters. It would be nice to support a shorter
> >> non-bold representation like we did with `of'.
> >>
> >> Ideas:
> >>
> >>   <<a and 2<<a for `LWB a' and `2 LWB a' respectively.
> >>   >>a and 2>>a for `UPB a' and `2 UPB a' respectively.
> >>
> >>   /<a and 2/<a    ''
> >>   \\a and 2//a    ''
> >>
> >>   -<a and 2-<a    ''
> >>   +<a and 2+<a    ''
> >>
> >>   -/a and 2-/a    ''
> >>   +/a and 2+/a    ''
> >>
> >> Reminder:
> >>
> >>   monads: %^&+-~!?
> >>   nomads: ></=*
> >>
> >> Thoughts?
> >>
>
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