On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 3:08 PM, Rustom Mody <rustompm...@gmail.com> 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. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
