Difficult to access symbols used in public API

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
julia
Domain
api

Research direction

Start at the transferentropy API and inspect how its unicode keyword arguments, especially 𝒯, are defined and used. Check related documentation and call sites before proposing an accessible replacement; done means the public keyword choice is agreed and consistently updated wherever this API is exposed.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

One of the main API functions, transferentropy, has keyword arguments based on unicode symbols that are hard to access. I am specifically referring to 𝒯.

Some developers recommend to not use unicode at all for public API. E.g., SciMLStyle:

Unicode is fine within code where it increases legibility, but in no case should Unicode be used in public APIs. This is to allow support for terminals which cannot use Unicode: if a keyword argument must be η, then it can be exclusionary to uses on clusters which do not support Unicode inputs.

Personally, I think that Unicode should be okay to use as long as it is easily accessible with tab completion, and immediatelly obviously which symbol should be used. Even if the terminal cannot display it and uses a box for it, Julia will still properly use it as a keyword. So that's why I am not so fanatically opposed to unicode.

However, I am not sure how to input 𝒯, but I am sure that τ is 'tau. I think we should consider a different symbol for the scripted capital T.

Dominant language
Julia
Stars
13
Forks
5
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