nemesis wrote:
> I'm guessing your proposal would not play nice with notepad folks...

Less a proposal than a thought thrown out to look over, yes.  And you'd 
definitely not be writing it in notepad, unless you used wordstar or 
html conventions or something. (I.e., embedded markers, like <b>int</b> 
or embedded control characters or something.)

APL, after all, used greek letters (mostly) for built-in functions 
(along with things like a proper division sign), and ascii for 
user-defined variables and functions, and with the appropriate 
infrastructure (such as keyboards with the characters printed on them) 
it really wasn't a problem as such. You couldn't read the program on a 
terminal that didn't have the right character sets, of course, but 
that's hardly a problem nowadays.

And of course 8-bit BASIC interpreters did something similar internally, 
but decoded it into text for display.

But yeah, it doesn't seem like there's a particular technological 
benefit to trying that.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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