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If students struggle with the use of Greek letters as symbols, it'll be difficult for them to deal with lots of math and physics where this is the standard notation. Intuitively it feels that the best thing that the language can do here is to enable notation that is the closest to the underlying math.

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> If students struggle with the use of Greek letters as symbols

After using Character map or other "user friendly" methods to enter Greek letters as symbols on a computer, i would say, yes, people struggle with the use of Greek letters. Unless, of course, one has a Greek keyboard.

I always install WinCompose specifically for this. Then a Greek letter is as simple as pressing Compose with *, followed by the related Roman letter. Though I still struggle to remember which key maps to which for the letters with no real 1-to-1 mapping (like theta).

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