I installed J on my Samsung Galaxy Note 2 phone, and it's really handy. The install was simple, and it's fairly easy to use. Not too many hassles with keyboards or character sets, though I had to deal with setting the default keyboard for J. I wouldn't want to give up that ease of use, to just try to support a new set of glyphs.
The main issue though, is that the Note 2 has a high-res graphics touchscreen, graphic pen (with case insert), multiple soft keyboards, handwriting recognition, built-in mike and speaker, and on and on. All the physical pieces are there to support all kinds of input mechanisms and displays, for multiple character sets. There is even an Android OS option for selecting the default soft keyboard for each specific application, from a list of soft keyboards. Interestingly, the standard Android soft keyboard already has several mathematical symbols on it, as well as many other glyphs, all of which I can type into J or an email, using the default soft keyboard. Of course, J doesn't know what to do with a real multiply or divide symbol (× ÷), which is why J provides an alternate keyboard for J entry... Wait! Isn't that what J was trying to get away from? All the symbols from the Android default soft keyboard at least show up in * my* email when I send myself an email. No telling what will happen when someone else views that email. Well, this is a post to the J Programming forum so we''ll see what happens. Here are a few of the characters that I can type on my Note 2 ×÷=%_$~<>○□■☆★♡♥◇◆¤《》¡¿ If this doesn't display correctly, the first few characters are: times (saltire), divide (obelus), equals, percent, underscore, dollar, tilde, less than, greater than, circle, empty box. fillled box, empty 5-point star, filled 5-point star, empty heart, filled heart, empty diamond, filled diamond, sputnik, double less-than, double greater-then, upside down exclamation point, upside-down question-mark. (Sorry, but I don't know the official manes for all these glyphs). J was designed with the assumption that the ASCII character set and keyboard would be the input/display mechanism of choice for the foreseeable future. Not a bad assumption at the time, but that assumption is starting to be challenged. The default Android keyboard does NOT follow the full ASCII standard. In any case, my main point is that the hardware is no longer the limiting factor for implementing a single-glyph symbol set. If Google can do it, so can we. Now it 's all just a simple matter of software :-) Skip ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
