I think it's crazy that we limit programming languages to using ASCII in 2022. Yes, I understand the chicken-and-egg issues of input, but it still seems like we're limiting ourselves as developers if we don't make use of a richer symbology. I know Raku supports some Unicode operators and Guy Steele's Fortress language also supported non-ASCII symbols so it is possible. But I'm not holding my breath. This is just one old man's crazy opinion.
AFAIK Fortress did not actually support non-ASCII symbols in the code. What the Fortress team did is have a display layer that was fed a list of symbols using ‘\BigSum’ style ASCII and then merely displayed a selected Unicode symbol in the editor.
"Wouldn't it be nice if modern programmers had some more symbols at their disposal?"
Emacs lets you display arbitrary text as any symbol you want, and you can also map your keyboard to generate that text with any keystroke of your choice.
So the result is the same, without needing language support for the symbols you want to use.
I've done this with the lamba symbol and symbolic logic symbols when editing LaTeX files in emacs. It works great.
Read up on the Compose key. ASCII-based keyboards also don’t not prevent Chinese/Japanese/Koreans/etc. from writing their scripts with them. Entering Unicode symbols by keyboard is not a problem. Few programming languages support them for operators though.
I’ve been dabbling in this, and created my own keyboard layout to include all kinds of math characters using the right Alt key for level 3 and level 4 shift. Also replaced caps lock with the compose key. Didn’t take too long to get accustomed to it since it’s a corruption of the Greek keyboard layout (which is laid out similar to QWERTY).
I haven’t had the audacity to use it in production code, but it’s interesting to play around with and great for quick note taking or hacker news comments. (Sadly I’m on my phone right now to not make use of it for this comment)
I am using a Stream Deck for that. Should have bought the largest one, but even the medium size on is quite useful via nested menus. Here are some symbols I am using for a formalisation in Isabelle currently: ∀∃⊤⊥𝔇𝔄≽⇒𝒰υτ↣𝟭‹›∅×∈⊆
Something like the DuckyPad[0,1] might work for that as well. I haven't tried using mine for APL or anything like that, but it's been great for use as a "Zoom meeting control", numpad, and MacOS shortcut pad.
