On 2011-02-16, Xah Lee wrote: │ Vast majority of computer languages use ASCII as its character set. │ This means, it jams multitude of operators into about 20 symbols. │ Often, a symbol has multiple meanings depending on contex.
On 2011-02-17, rantingrick wrote: … On 2011-02-17, Cthun wrote: │ And you omitted the #1 most serious objection to Xah's proposal, │ rantingrick, which is that to implement it would require unrealistic │ things such as replacing every 101-key keyboard with 10001-key keyboards │ and training everyone to use them. Xah would have us all replace our │ workstations with machines that resemble pipe organs, rantingrick, or │ perhaps the cockpits of the three surviving Space Shuttles. No doubt │ they'd be enormously expensive, as well as much more difficult to learn │ to use, rantingrick. keyboard shouldn't be a problem. Look at APL users. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language) they are happy campers. Look at Mathematica, which support a lot math symbols since v3 (~1997) before unicode became popular. see: 〈How Mathematica does Unicode?〉 http://xahlee.org/math/mathematica_unicode.html word processors, also automatically do symbols such as “curly quotes”, trade mark sign ™, copyright sing ©, arrow →, bullet •, ellipsis … etc, and the number of people who produce document with these chars are probably more than the number of programers. in emacs, i recently also wrote a mode that lets you easily input few hundred unicode chars. 〈Emacs Math Symbols Input Mode (xmsi-mode)〉 http://xahlee.org/emacs/xmsi-math-symbols-input.html the essence is that you just need a input system. look at Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Islamic. They happily type without requiring that every symbol they use must have a corresponding key on keyboard. Some lang, such as Chinese, that's impossible or impractical. when a input system is well designd, it could be actually more efficient than keyboard combinations to typo special symbols (such as in Mac OS X's opt key, or Windows's AltGraph). Because a input system can be context based, that it looks at adjacent text to guess what you want. for example, when you type >= in python, the text editor can automatically change it to ≥ (when it detects that it's appropriate, e.g. there's a “if” nearby) Chinese phonetic input system use this extensively. Abbrev system in word processors and emacs is also a form of this. I wrote some thought about this here: 〈Designing a Math Symbols Input System〉 http://xahlee.org/comp/design_math_symbol_input.html Xah Lee -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
