common meanings of punctuation characters

I'm writing my own syntax and want characters that do not have obvious common meanings in that syntax [1]. Is there a list of the开发者_高级运维 common meanings of punctuation characters (e.g. '?' could be part of a ternary operator, or part of a regex) so I can try to pick those which may not have 'obvious' syntax (I can be the judge of that :-).

[1] It's actually an extended Fortran FORMAT, but the details are irrelevant here

Here is an exhaustive survey of syntax across languages.

I am loath to be so defeatist, but this does sound a bit like it doesn't exist ( a list of all the symbols / operators across languages ) a quick look around would give a good idea of what is commonplace.

Assuming that you will restrict yourself to ASCII, the short-list is more or less what you can see on your keyboard and I can can think of a few uses for most of them. So maybe avoiding conflicts is a bit ambitious. Of course it depends on who is to be the user of this syntax, if for example symbols that are relatively unused in Fotran would be suitable then that is more realistic.

This link: Fotran 95 Spec gives a list of Fortran operators, which might help if avoided.

I'm sorry if any of this is a statement of the obvious or missing the point, or just not very helpful :)

I would say [a-z][A-Z] All do not have an obvious syntax for instance. if you used Upper case T as an operator.

x T v

The downfall is people like to use letters for variables.

Other than that you might want to investigate multicharacter operators, the downfall of these however is that they quickly grow weary to type things like

scalar = vec4i *+ vec4j

if you perhaps had a Fused multiply add operator. Well that one isnt so bad, but I'm sure you can find more cumbersome ones.