The title would probably be confusing, but I could not make it better than this. I noticed that most programming languages are limited to the alphanumerical set along with the special characters present in a general keyboard. I wondered if this posed a barrier for developers on what characters they were limited to program in, or if it was intentional from the start that these keys would be the most optimal characters for a program to be coded in by a human and was later adopted as a standard for every user. Basically, are the modern keyboards built around programming languages or are programming languages built around these keyboards?

  • snoweMA
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    110 months ago

    An example (that you can’t type) is: yā<ã.Δ¹sŸèOQ

    I think the only thing here you can’t type is the superscript. The rest is easily typeable, at least on a Mac or a smartphone.

    • @[email protected]
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      110 months ago

      Well, soft keyboards thend to do that yeah. But nobody is using a smartphone to program.

      The point is that nobody is good enough at 05AB1E to type it by hand, everyone just has an idea of what they’re trying to accomplish and copy-pastes commands from the documentation.

      • snoweMA
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        210 months ago

        I wasn’t talking just touchscreen keyboards. On Mac you just hold option and you can type almost all of those letters. I do understand your point though. Thanks for explaining

      • snoweMA
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        210 months ago

        Are you typing the character or using markdown to accomplish that?

        • TerrorBite :veripawed3:
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          210 months ago

          @snowe Typing the character. With GBoard it’s switch to numbers+symbols then press and hold a number (in this case 1) to access fractions and superscripts.

          • snoweMA
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            110 months ago

            Hmm Gboard on iphone doesn’t do that. Strange. I can hold plenty of other letters and numbers (like 0 to get °), but not 1-9.