One of the rather unique features of the Fortress¹ programming language is that it has builtin support for Unicode operators. For example, instead of using “==” you would use U+2261. After reading the spec, and a recent thread on ruby-core, I’ve been wondering something . Are language designers too limited in their decisions about syntax because of the limitations of the QWERTY² keyboard?

Back in March, I announced the Ruby Mendicant project after several readers of this blog encouraged me to pursue the idea. For those who didn’t see the follow up details elsewhere, here’s the readers digest version:

Thanks to 70 donors, and donation matching from Ruby Central, Inc. and MountainWest Ruby LLC, I am now able to take 22 weeks off from my commercial work to focus on open source development in Ruby. I had a number of project ideas, but the general consensus is that my time would be best spent building a fast, sleek, and simple PDF library for Ruby. I’ve decided to call this library Prawn, for the time being.

Since I have just reached my first checkpoint on the project, I figured I’d give folks an update on where things are.