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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

I love the keyboard. Wouldn't it be nice if modern programmers had some more symbols at their disposal?

I think it's crazy that we limit programming languages to using ASCII in 2022. Yes, I understand the chicken-and-egg issues of input, but it still seems like we're limiting ourselves as developers if we don't make use of a richer symbology. I know Raku supports some Unicode operators and Guy Steele's Fortress language also supported non-ASCII symbols so it is possible. But I'm not holding my breath. This is just one old man's crazy opinion.

Julia supports most unicode characters for function and variable names (and operators), so you can write, eg, "∑(x,µ) = x ⊗ µ" and it won't complain.

AFAIK Fortress did not actually support non-ASCII symbols in the code. What the Fortress team did is have a display layer that was fed a list of symbols using ‘\BigSum’ style ASCII and then merely displayed a selected Unicode symbol in the editor.

Ah, thanks. It's been a while since I looked at the Fortress papers.

JavaScript, Java and C# all allow Unicode characters as identifiers.

We do. Look at Scala. Almost no limitations here.

"Wouldn't it be nice if modern programmers had some more symbols at their disposal?"

Emacs lets you display arbitrary text as any symbol you want, and you can also map your keyboard to generate that text with any keystroke of your choice.

So the result is the same, without needing language support for the symbols you want to use.

I've done this with the lamba symbol and symbolic logic symbols when editing LaTeX files in emacs. It works great.

Read up on the Compose key. ASCII-based keyboards also don’t not prevent Chinese/Japanese/Koreans/etc. from writing their scripts with them. Entering Unicode symbols by keyboard is not a problem. Few programming languages support them for operators though.

Not really but if you are up to it, Julia allows for it.

I’ve been dabbling in this, and created my own keyboard layout to include all kinds of math characters using the right Alt key for level 3 and level 4 shift. Also replaced caps lock with the compose key. Didn’t take too long to get accustomed to it since it’s a corruption of the Greek keyboard layout (which is laid out similar to QWERTY).

I haven’t had the audacity to use it in production code, but it’s interesting to play around with and great for quick note taking or hacker news comments. (Sadly I’m on my phone right now to not make use of it for this comment)

I am using a Stream Deck for that. Should have bought the largest one, but even the medium size on is quite useful via nested menus. Here are some symbols I am using for a formalisation in Isabelle currently: ∀∃⊤⊥𝔇𝔄≽⇒𝒰υτ↣𝟭‹›∅×∈⊆

> I am using a Stream Deck for that.

Something like the DuckyPad[0,1] might work for that as well. I haven't tried using mine for APL or anything like that, but it's been great for use as a "Zoom meeting control", numpad, and MacOS shortcut pad.

[0] https://github.com/dekuNukem/duckyPad/

[1] https://www.tindie.com/products/dekuNukem/duckypad-do-it-all...

You could probably get it working on any keyboard with Autohotkey on Windows

Ahk can override keyboard button presses with just about anything and you can use a layer key as a modifier

xmodmap in Unix/X11 also.

But I'd really like a language that comes with its own keyboard :)

I mean, other people should be able to edit my code.

Provide a copy of your ZMK keymap file and a recommended build target alongside your software (lol)

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