Problems of Symbol Congestion in Computer Languages

[Westley Martínez]

On Thu, 2011-02-17 at 22:28 -0500, Chris Jones wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 09:55:47PM EST, Cor Gest wrote:
> > Some entity, AKA Cthun <cthun_117 at qmail.net.au>,
> 
> [..]
> 
> > > And you omitted the #1 most serious objection to Xah's proposal,
> > > rantingrick, which is that to implement it would require unrealistic
> > > things such as replacing every 101-key keyboard with 10001-key
> > > keyboards and training everyone to use them. Xah would have us all
> > > replace our workstations with machines that resemble pipe organs,
> > > rantingrick, or perhaps the cockpits of the three surviving Space
> > > Shuttles. No doubt they'd be enormously expensive, as well as much
> > > more difficult to learn to use, rantingrick.
> 
> > At least it should try to mimick a space-cadet keyboard, shouldn't it? 
> 
> Implementation details, and not very accurate at that.. the APL keyboard
> has not additional keys and yet it has the potential to add up to 100
> additional symbols to the US-ASCII keyboard, half of which are produced
> via a single modifier.. same as upper-case letters. So unless more than
> 50+20 = 70 symbols are needed the keyboard conversion would cost about..
> what.. $2.00 in stickers and maybe ten minutes to place them.
> 
> Maybe the problem lies elsewhere..?
> 
> cj
> 
$2.00 * thousands of programmers -> thousands of dollars + thousands of
lost training time; not to mention code conversion.