I know you weren't being entirely serious.

But, more seriously, why did you feel compelled to give the unicode code points and the long names of the characters you used? Didn't you trust the chain between you and me to preserve all those lovely characters?

If you go back a few years and look at CACM and SIGPLAN papers from the 60's and 70's you'll see a curious thing. The programs are typeset. They do use × for multiplication; quite often identifiers were typeset in bold (or keywords were) meaning that variables names could be the same as keywords (since they were typographically distinct). «if if > then then then = else else else = fi fi» was correct ALGOL (I think). You'll have to fill in the bold, since I don't trust this blog with it. ;) BCPL does in fact use ¬ in its "publication form", how you type this into your terminal on your computer facility was always a matter for local interpretation.

I once used (and in fact, wrote the help for) an ML system which printed the keyword «fn» as λ (this was in 1994 when something like that was quite radical). It was quite amusing.