fonts/Hasklig 1.1 NetBSD

Programming languages are limited to relatively few characters. As a result, combined character operators surfaced quite early, such as the widely used arrow (->), comprised of a hyphen and greater sign. It looks like an arrow if you know the analogy and squint a bit.

Composite glyphs are problematic in languages such as Haskell which utilize these complicated operators (=> -< >>= etc.) extensively. The readability of such complex code improves with pretty printing. Academic articles featuring Haskell code often use lhs2tex to achieve an appealing rendering, but it is of no use when programming.

Some Haskellers have resorted to Unicode symbols, which are valid in the ghc. However they are one-character-wide and therefore eye-strainingly small. Furthermore, when displayed as substitutes to the underlying multi-character representation, as vim2hs does, the characters go out of alignment.

Hasklig solves the problem the way typographers have always solved ill-fitting characters which co-occur often: ligatures. The underlying code stays the same - only the representation changes. Not only can multi-character glyphs be rendered more vividly, other problematic things in monospaced fonts, such as spacing can be corrected.