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Comment by dsr_ | Hacker News Reader

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dsr_·

If it's not on the keyboard, nobody is going to type it.

Solutions:

a) only use characters in the intersection of the top N most popular keyboard layouts

b) issue programmers' keyboards with an agreed character set

c) issue programmers' keypads with supplementary characters

d) add on-screen supplementary keypads

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I used to use Mathematica a lot and it was never an issue that the keyboard doesn’t have an integral sign or a lambda. You just type :int or :lambda and it displays as the proper character.

When working with mathematical modeling it’s honestly just so refreshing and every other symbolic math solution in other languages feels decades behind.

But alas Mathematica is proprietary and expensive enough that it’s always a management decision if you want to use it, so I never use it any more.

Hmm, Julia begs to differ, with most editors replacing lambda with the lambda Unicode symbol for example.

Using ligatures (of sort) in presenting code doesn't mean the code itself is not ASCII. Plus, let's see mainstream languages adopt this, I doubt they will. Languages do stupid things all the time.

It means in julia, the Editor and the repl actually replace \lambda with the unicode greek letter

This seems to be a solved problem, if we want it to be. We can easily enough teach our programming editors either that typing < followed by = should convert to ≤ automatically unless you press some sort of literal key first (say Esc), or that typing some sort of compose key (say Alt Gr) followed by < and then = should convert to ≤.

What we need is a programmer orientated IME.

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