I wish ASCII had a few more symbols and didn't waste 32 values on control codes.

Missing characters imho:

fixed width space, degree symbol, copyright/trademark symbols, the opposite direction of `, maybe a few more like pilcrow, section symbol, dagger, generic currency symbol, card suits, arrows and a few mathematical ones like +-, roughly equal, not equal, ...

Why I care about ASCII here? Because programming language source code is still written in that, and it's also those symbols that appear on standard US keyboard layout.

I think those extra symbols would have made life easier in many cases, more than some of the more obscure control characters it has (such as the useless line break vs newline we are still suffering from). They could have gotten away with just 16 instead of 32 control characters imho, even in the times when they had mechanical machines with bells :p

> Why I care about ASCII here? Because programming language source code is still written in that, and it's also those symbols that appear on standard US keyboard layout.

None of the programming languages I've used in the last ten years, save perhaps brainfuck, used ASCII. It was all unicode, either through explicit configuration atop the source code file, or e.g. UTF-8 by default.

I mean core language keywords and operators, not strings or custom variable names. The core set is limited set for good reason, but a few more symbols could have helped, e.g. degree symbol is very common and could have been used for angles.

Did you know in C++ you can have a variables named as emoji? It compiles with clang++ with -std=c++11 :)

APL is a famous non-ASCII based programming language using arrows and such, but very difficult to type on a modern computer of course. Other than esoteric languages, I don't know any modern programming languages using non-ASCII symbols in core keywords and operators.

Haskell has Unicode synonyms for many of it's constructs (enabled by a compiler flag), so you can write eg. → instead of `->` and ∀ instead of `forall`.

https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode

Depending on your (irrational) feelings about fonts and typography, this may either be the most amazing advance in coding readability you've ever encountered, or a mild improvement, or even annoying. But I love them!

A number of coding-oriented fonts support them now:

https://medium.com/larsenwork-andreas-larsen/ligatures-codin...

also, small grammar niggle: "it's" should only be used where it can be replaced with "it is" and still make sense; otherwise it's always "its" :)