Non-ASCII in the future in the lexer

[H. S. Teoh]

On Thu, Jun 01, 2023 at 08:54:19PM +0000, Cecil Ward via Digitalmars-d wrote:
[...]
> I don’t want you all to misunderstand me here, I’m not suggesting that
> I can defend all of these ideas, I’m just trying to free up our
> imagination. If we decide that we really want some perfect symbol for
> a new situation, maybe something already established, perhaps in maths
> or elsewhere, then I’m merely saying that we should perhaps remember
> that unicode exists and is not a new weird thing anymore.
> 
> The usability thing is not something that I’m too worried about
> because solutions will rise to meet problems. I have my favourite
> little snippets of IPA characters in a document and I keep that handy.
> My iPad has installable keyboard handlers of all sorts, including poly
> tonic ancient greek.

Coincidentally, I recently wrote a program (in D, of course :-P) that
translates ASCII transcriptions of IPA into Unicode.  And many years
ago, I also wrote a program (in C -- this was before I discovered D)
that translated ASCII wrapped inside <grk>...</grk> or <rus>...</rus>
tags into polytonic Greek or Cyrillic.  In my text editor I could just
type out the desired ASCII transcriptions, select the text, and pipe it
through these programs to get the Unicode out.


> What made me think about this topic though is looking at my iPad’s
> virtual keyboard. The character … is no less accessible than ‘a’, and
> é and ß are just a long press. The ± £ § ¥ € characters on my iPad are
> no less accessible than ASCII. Over time, maybe keyboards will evolve
> seeing as it has already been with the iPad.
[...]

I believe that the next step is to USB/WiFi touchscreen keyboards that
can be reconfigured to any symbol set by software.  All we need is a
long, horizontal device with a touchscreen mounted on suitable support
that makes it comfortable to type on, then have a standard API for
software to configure whatever symbols it wishes the user to use on it.
Instantly switch to APL symbols and back, for example.  Or, for that
matter, have the layout completely software-driven: imagine instantly
switching from a typewriter keyboard to a piano keyboard, for example,
for easy music input. Or a guitar fret for instant MIDI improvisation.


T

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