That's an interesting topic. Do you happen to know if UTF-8 contains more "pair" characters? In Latex we call these delimiteres, but that's just my limited experience coming in from math side. I tend to agree that it would be helpful to have more kind of nesting/pairing/grouping/delimiting characters. The problem is my imagination is limited to what I know from the ASCII world, and so it goes... no idea what new sets would look like.
So many different pairs are available. I like Asian corner brackets 「」and French guillemets « ». The angle brackets 〈〉 are popular in CS/math papers I think, though they might be confused with <>.
I have had access to « » before, which led me to doing a double take when I first encountered a << on a work station with font ligatures. It was funny.
Which brings us to the philosophical question about paired characters: If we were to pick paired characters from a key set not available on everyone's keyboard, why must the paired characters even be used in real languages? Is that not actually actively detrimental when we end up needing the characters for real? Is this not why we even have escape characters to begin with?
Plus, must they be a part of anyone's real keyboard to begin with? What makes 「」any more valid than ¿? Could we not have saved ourselves a lot of mental strain if we solved it earlier on with a full set of truly uncommon characters?
I can imagine an alternate history, where some programming language in the late 70's made their editors with simple shortcuts (such as Ctrl+A for "array block") to input barely-if-ever-used yet low code character such as † or ‡, which would never be used outside of a string. And nowadays, with modern IDE's, we wouldn't even see those characters half the time. It would be syntax sugar, with blocks types stated in gutters and data types represented with colors or text.
That's an interesting topic. Do you happen to know if UTF-8 contains more "pair" characters? In Latex we call these delimiteres, but that's just my limited experience coming in from math side. I tend to agree that it would be helpful to have more kind of nesting/pairing/grouping/delimiting characters. The problem is my imagination is limited to what I know from the ASCII world, and so it goes... no idea what new sets would look like.