Show threadJdeBPMar 5

@lattera

I'm wondering how many people spotted the missing ^ there.

It's interesting to consider such an old convention still in use; in light of the fact that #Unicode not only has for the whole of this century so far given us proper arrow symbols, and even a Control-key symbol (⎈ U+2388), but also has a character (␗ U+2417) with a control code picture for ETB.

I still often use ^ too. (-:

#CaretNotation #SpecialCharacters #werase #ASCII

Show threadbs2Aug 20, 2022
... Church switched to the closest thing [to the caret ^], an uppercase lambda, Ax(x + x). The A was easily confused with other symbols, so eventually the lowercase lambda was substituted... #JohnMcCarthy was a student of Church's at Princeton, so when McCarthy invented #Lisp in 1958, he adopted the #lambdaNotation.
#AlonzoChurch #Notation now back to #CaretNotation for #Racket??
(define-syntax ^
(make-rename-transformer #'λ)) ; or ; #'lambda
((^ (x y) (expt x y)) 3 4) ; 81