Hello,

> > I _don't_ have to let the limitations of the keyboard stop me using a 
> perfectly good character.
> 
> The Japanese (and other oriental languages), with almost 100,000 symbols, have 
> had to deal with this for decades. That's why they invented the FAX.

  It sounds like that the invention of principle should be attributed
to British.  The actualization was done by Japanese as you mentioned.

> I think that current Japanese "word processors" guess the symbol from the 
> context and the phonetic typing. Allowing one to toggle through choices when it 
> guesses wrong or cant decide.
> 
> Yoshiki? What's best for selecting symbols not on the keyboard?

  One could imagine a input converter specialized for Squeak
programming.  The easiest would be when a user hits the underscore
key, the text editor inserts the different character according to the
precedent character in the pane.  If the precedent character is
non-letter, the editor inserts a left arrow (U+2190).  If not, it
inserts a underscore (U+005F).  It is similar to the latex-mode of
Emacs when you type "'" character.  What do you do when you want to
input left arrow in, say, a string constant?  You type space and
underscore, then remove the space.  It could do the same for the up
arrow.

  (One thing to note is that you don't want to deal with the converter
during you write code.  (boiled-egg style romaji-kanji converter may
be good here.)

-- Yoshiki