Unnormalized unicode

The idea for this example came from Sergey B. Kirpichev, who also wrote the first implementation.

Consider the following examples from Julia’s repl.

julia> ℕ = 1
1

julia> N = 2
2

julia> N, ℕ
(2, 1)

Let’s attempt to do the same thing with Python:

>>> ℕ = 1
>>> N = 2
>>> N, ℕ
(2, 2)

Clearly, something is very different between these two programming environments, both used heavily by scientists. It is possible to make Python’s output look similar to that of Julian.

> python -m ideas -a unnormalized_unicode
   The following initializing code from ideas is included:

true_dir = dir
from ideas.examples.unnormalized_unicode import new_dir as dir

Ideas Console version 0.0.34. [Python version: 3.8.10]

>>> ℕ = 1
>>> N = 2
>>> N, ℕ
(2, 1)

To understand why Python normally consider ℕ and N to be the same requires more knowledge about unicode than what is found in a typical tutorial. But before we take a deeper dive into unicode land, let’s take a detour and talk about Julia.

More to come…