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The infix macro uses ‘**’ as exponentiation operator and
‘^’ as bitwise XOR operator; this is controversial because a lot of
people, especially LaTeX users, is used to think of ‘^’ as
exponentiation operator. The C language has established a tradition to
interpret ‘^’ as bitwise exclusive OR operator, and the Python
language has adopted it; Vicare sticks to it, too.
The C language has established a tradition of interpreting the single vertical bar ‘|’ as bitwise inclusive OR operator and the double vertical bar as ‘||’ as logical inclusive OR operator.
In the R6RS Scheme language the vertical bar is used in the block comments delimiters ‘#| … |#’. Vicare’s source code reader uses the vertical bar to specify symbols whose name does not comply with R6RS, Miscellaneous additional syntaxes. Some text editors for software programmers handle the vertical bar specially in Scheme mode, in particular for syntax highlighting.
It would be possible to extend Vicare’s reader to allow
‘|’ and ‘||’ to be symbols, but, at present, this confuses
some text editors in a way that is not easy to fix. So, for now, rather
than the vertical bar, infix recognises the Unicode character
vertical bar extension (‘\x23D0;’) as bitwise inclusive OR and the
double vertical bar extension as logical inclusive OR.