Why UTF-8/16 character encodings?

[H. S. Teoh]

On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 02:14:17PM -0700, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 5/26/2013 1:44 PM, Hans W. Uhlig wrote:
> >Using those characters would be wonderful and while we do have
> >unicode software support we don't really have unicode hardware
> >support. I am still on my 102 key keyboard and I haven't really seen
> >a good expanded character keyboard come along.
> 
> I have a post-it stuck to my monitor with the numbers for various
> unicode characters, but I just can't see that for writing code.

I have been thinking about this idea of a "reprogrammable keyboard", in
that the keys are either a fixed layout with LCD labels on each key, or
perhaps the whole thing is a long touchscreen, that allows arbitrary
relabelling of keys (or, in the latter case, complete dynamic
reconfiguration of layout). There would be some convenient way to switch
between layouts, say a scrolling sidebar or roller dial of some sort, so
you could, in theory, type Unicode directly.

I haven't been able to refine this into an actual, implementable idea,
though.


T

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