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Comment by eviks | Hacker News Reader

Are there smarter math markup languages that take advantage of Unicode and allow entering actual math symbols instead of spelling every name? It's just that on a proper computer it's easy to set up a few (or many if you typeset math alot) actual math symbols that would take as much or less effort to type, but look way more readable even in the unparsed format

For example,

∑(i=1)^n instead of

sum_(i=1)^n

√x instead of

sqrt x

View on HN

Not exactly what you're asking for, but in Julia you can write and use unicode symbols like this under the backslash key (supported both in the REPL and VS Code plugin), which lets you use more operators and makes the code look fancier

Folks have worked up macro support for replacing Unicode symbols w/ equivalent LaTeX commands, as well as the reverse, so that it's possible to round-trip.

∑√

These keys aren't on my keyboard.

If they're on your keyboard, just reprogram them to emit `sum` and `sqrt` respectively.

Unicode is for viewing; keyboard locales are for inputting. We're never going to have 2^32 keys on our keyboards.

Use the power of combinatorics! 26 keys offer 18252 2 letter + three letter combinations.

Using special chars even more.

Compose key is memetic and easy to use on all operating systems.

>Unicode is for viewing

So? That's exactly what ∑√ allows you to do: view these nicer chars instead of the verbose/ugly names

> We're never going to have 2^32 keys on our keyboards.

And how is this relevant? You don't need 2^32, a much smaller number would suffice. Just read the posted link and count the number of rows - that's closer to your upper limit

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