Unicode in Squeak

(Excuse the odd formatting; blogger.com isn't liking my Unicode symbols in this post and is doing odd things with line heights)

Somebody on the Squeak mailing list asked about how to do an open Interval. I came up with:

1 to: ∞

I had added "∞" as a global variable equal to "Float infinity" and my example... just worked! When I was looking at the character table for the infinity sign, I came across a ton of other gems. These would be all quite possible in Squeak, and many of them trivial.

( (22 ÷ 7) ≈ (π ± ¼) ) → true or false, π and ¼ are constants and ± would return an object representing a numeric accuracy object of some sort.
((c ∪ d) ⊂ e) → true or false for collections c, d, and e.
(a ∧ b ∨ c) ¬ " The not-sign needs to come after expressions. "

1 … 3 → returns an interval. The ellipses is a single Unicode character.
2¹⁶ → 2 raisedTo: 16.
∅ → An empty, immutable Set instance.

There are loads of symbols available that would work as constants, method selectors, variables (greek letters anybody?) and so forth. Some of them won't work, such as using a dollar-sign for currency values. I'm not sure about '∃' and '∀' because of Smalltalk's message order; these two symbols are some odd prefix-type expression.

Another useful symbol would be some sort of concatenation operator, but (not being a proper mathematician) I don't know one. This operator would allow you to easily make a collection, e.g.

#a | ∅ " A new set containing #a. This could be implemented, but '|' is already used in Boolean operations. "
varA | varB | varC | ∅ " Shorthand for making a collection. Replace '∅' to change the type of collection. "

There's a Unicode character called a "Character tie": http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2040/index.htm. Would this make a potential concatenation operator?:

varA ⁀ varB ⁀ varC ⁀ ∅ " Meh "

Subcanvas: first graphics.

A screenshot:


 
What is it? Well, it's an orange line, green rectangle, filled blue rectangle and small blue bit of text. The relevance here is that I've gotten some basic graphics output from Subcanvas.

The features that you aren't seeing here are:

• The code for this is in a Package, and the classes are all in Namespaces. Namespaces really work! Although... I have found some more nasty bugs that destroy code.
  
• The coordinates used are measured in micrometers. Those are 20mm by 20mm boxes on my screen, roughly.

My next steps are to add support for child canvases and keyboard / mouse event handling.