On Tuesday, March 25, 2014 9:59:48 AM UTC+5:30, Chris Angelico wrote: > On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 3:08 PM, Rustom Mody wrote: > > And Chris is right in (rephrasing) we may have unicode-happy OSes and > > languages. We cant reasonably have unicode-happy keyboards. > > [What would a million-key keyboard look like? Lets leave the cost aside...]
> Actually, it wouldn't be that bad. Unicode allows for only 1114112 > characters (thanks to UTF-16), of which only the first three planes > have any actual characters on them (so, a maximum of about 200K > characters). All you'd need would be a system that organizes them > (using their hex codepoints isn't exactly useful), and you could type > any character with a maximum of, say, 6-8 keystrokes; Huffman coded, > of course, so the average would be 1.5 keystrokes per character > actually used. Add one meta key: Charset. Hold that and press L and > you get (say) λ, U+03BB; Charset+Shift+L is Λ, U+039B. Ctrl+Charset+L > might give you a Cyrillic л (U+043B), and Ctrl+Charset+Shift+L would > then be Л (U+041B), the upper-case version of that. > Emacs users would love it. Its already there -- and even easier Switch to cyrillic-jis-russian (whatever that is!) and I get л from k Л from K Full layout +----------------------------------------------------------------+ |1 !|2 @|3 #|4 ” |5 :|6 ,|7 .|8 *|9 (|0 )| − _|= +| ё Ё | +----------------------------------------------------------------+ | й Й | ц Ц | у У | к К | е Е | н Н | г Г | ш Ш | щ Щ | з З | х Х | ъ Ъ | +------------------------------------------------------------+ | ф Ф | ы Ы | в В | а А | п П | р Р | о О | л Л | д Д | ж Ж | э Э |\ || +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | я Я | ч Ч | с С | м М | и И | т Т | ь Ь | б Б | ю Ю |/ ?| +-------------------------------------------------+ +-----------------------------+ | space bar | +-----------------------------+ The catch is in the claim to huffman coding Huffman coding requires a statistical distribution Whose shall we take And now the discussion is political not technical -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list