Arrows for SCA modes

[alice]

Borderline Ephemera, perhaps; but anyway, here's a fruitful source of very fine hairs to split. When doing the match-and-replace which is the basis of every SCA, there are three principal modes, which can operate in forward and reverse directions:

- Single: replace only the first (or last) occurrence
- Non-overlapped (one "ana" in "banana")
- Overlapped (two of them)

There is a large number of arrow characters in standard Unicode; which would you use to represent each mode?

[akam chinjir]

I think I'd never remember which arrow is which, and would prefer a more explicit sort of annotation, even if it takes more keystrokes.

(I've been playing a bit with phonix, and it doesn't offer those options, but you can flag a rule with "direction=right-to-left", which is really easy to remember. (Assuming I haven't remembered it wrong!))

[Zju]

Borderline Ephemera, perhaps; but anyway, here's a fruitful source of very fine hairs to split. When doing the match-and-replace which is the basis of every SCA, there are three principal modes, which can operate in forward and reverse directions:

- Single: replace only the first (or last) occurrence
- Non-overlapped (one "ana" in "banana")
- Overlapped (two of them)

There is a large number of arrow characters in standard Unicode; which would you use to represent each mode?

Personal preference - not any fancy special unicode arrow characters, but:

- Single: > - single character
- Non-overlapped -> - non overlapping line
- Overlapped => - "overlapping" lines