Unicode Escapes

For 2 months, as of writing, I’ve been working on Vern, an array language built around the idea of creating complexity from simplicity.

Arraylangs¹ usually² use Unicode glyphs to allow for concise code.
While this is very convenient for code size, it’s not very convenient for actually writing it, since you need to find a way to write those glyphs.

Every array language has a different way of solving this issue, and since I’ve been writing my own, I’ve been thinking about these systems quite a bit.

APL does nothing about this natively; you need copy-and-paste the symbols, use a keyboard with the symbols, or use an editor with shortcuts for it.

J, K, and Q fixes this by not having Unicode character at all.

BQN fixes this by having escapes in the online editor triggered by ‘\’, then pressing a key, creating a glyph³.

Uiua does, in my opinion, the most ergonomic of all these solutions;
a built-in formatter formats things like lasbysor into ⊣⊸⍆ (last, by, sort) or %* into ÷×, automatically finding valid operator names even if they’re slightly incomplete.
This makes it very convenient to quickly write out long lines.

Vern does a mix of the previous two solutions;
Vern has a preprocessor that converts ‘\’-based escapes into the corresponding glyphs, e.g. \%\* into ÷×, \d\.id\ into ⊓●, or +\,1969 into +₁₉₆₉;
\. is used for multi-character names, \, is used for subscript, \' is used for superscript, and just \ only escapes a single character.
The shortcuts command can be used inside of Vern’s REPL to show the glyph shortcuts:

> vern -repl
Vern 0.14.0 (end with ctrl-c, type 'help' for a list of commands)
   shortcuts

\': superscript
\,: subscript

\.multiply\, \.mult\, \* - ×
\.divide\, \.div\, \% - ÷
\.iota\, \.io\, \i - ɩ
\.shape\, \.sha\, \.sh\ - △
\.scan\, \.sca\, \.sc\, \s - ⍀
\.notequal\, \.neq\, \n - ≠
\.pop\, \.po\, \p - ⌄
\.box\, \.bx\, \b - ■
\.unbox\, \.unbx\, \.un\, \u - □
\.index\, \.ind\ - ∈
\.first\, \.fir\, \f - ⊢
\.last\, \.la\, \l - ⊣
\.decapitate\, \.decapit\, \.decap\, \.de\, \d - ⊓
\.join\, \.joi\, \.jo\, \j - ⋈
\.identity\, \.iden\, \.id\ - ●
\.modulo\, \.modu\, \.mod\, \m - ◿
\.lrot\, \.lr\ - ↺
\.rrot\, \.rr\ - ↻
\.switch\, \.swi\, \.sw\ - ⊻
\.reverse\, \.rever\, \.rev\, \r - ⧖
\.round\, \.rou\ - ⁅
\.floor\, \.flo\ - ⌊
\.ceiling\, \.ceil\ - ⌈

I choose this system because a system like Uiua’s solution is infeasible with how Vern operates (Vern is a much more flexible language compared to Uiua), and BQN’s only operated in the editor.