It's legal Julia.

Julia editors or VS Code with the Julia plugin support LaTeX commands and will perform autocompletion and convert it to the unicode character.

For example, if you write \nabla it will offer autocompletion and write ∇.

I think it's a neat feature and makes a lot of sense in scientific computing contexts but I feel I wouldn't like a code-base that abuses it too much. Sprinkled here and there can help make code more readable, succinct and pleasant.

I think it's great for mathematicians, but I shudder to think what some Scala library builders might do if they get there hands on this.

> but I feel I wouldn't like a code-base that abuses it too much

This is why I think it was a poor design choice to include the feature and actively encourage its use. The benefit of potentially more succint code is far outweighed by having to look with a codebase written entirely in Greek and there's no way to enforce moderation.

It's impossible to impose moderation in any language and you don't need unicode characters to write stupid code. Java programmers were writing HelloWorldFactory classes way before Julia existed.

Style guide for the base language is to generally stick to ascii, and many of the big packages do that too. It's really nice in examples, analysis scripts and the like though.

The REPL (and most tooling I think) supports LaTeX-like abbreviations that autocomplete to the corresponding Unicode symbol, so no need for a special keyboard.

See here https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/unicode-input/

You can write \pi and then press tab. It works in the julia repl, and also on most editors that have julia plugins.

Works for all greek letters, and other unicode characters.

Every Western-style input method should come with a Compose function enabled, and a simple tutorial on how to use it.

For example, on Windows I use Wincompose [1], that lets me type things like "⋄*g" for Greek gamma: 'γ', or "⋄ee" for 'ə', or even "⋄⋄plane" for a '' (and of course the list is customizable). The "⋄" symbol represents the Compose key, which I chose to map to the Caps Lock key on my keyboard.

[1] http://wincompose.info/

Edit: HN removed the airplane icon.

I've been thinking about a dynamic keyboard where each key is a tiny oled screen that shows what character you're going to type in this particular mode. And then you're free to switch from regular to math to Greek to Chinese if you want, and the keyboard simply adjusts.

Such as Optimus Maximus, for example?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qj7GYU-wedo