Philippe Marschall wrote:
> 2007/4/4, Matthew Fulmer:
> > How could anyone type such a character? would we modify the
> > mass-produced keyboard, or create some partially obscure input
> > method? Of course, it would be easy with a pen. I don't
> > understand how Unicode will be anything other than a curiosity
> > as long as the keyboard stays around. Of course, that may have
> > something to do with living in the US, where nobody understands
> > culture.
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode#Input_methods

None of these are acceptable for something that has to be typed very
often. I would suggest alt-arrow or even just shift-arrow as a way of
getting all four proper Unicode arrow characters into our code. Having
recently played with several old computers (like the TRS-80) on FPGA
development boards I found it interesting that they all had arrows in
their character sets and a few even made it easy to type them.

About the parallel thread of the pointlessness of following old
standards, I will repeat the history (there are always new people here
who haven't heard it yet) of how we got into this mess in the first
place. The preliminary version of ASCII did have arrow characters and so
early implementors like DEC and Xerox put them in their keyboards and
printers. When the final version came out, the up arrow had been
replaced by the carret and the left arrow by the underscore. But too
many devices were already in use to update them all so the following
years (up to the late 1980s, really) saw an awful mix. When the
Smalltalk people decided to abandon their own character sets (and later
floating point formats) for industry standards they adopted ASCII as it
was used in all Xerox equipment. So it was equivalent to sticking to
qwerty when parts of the world were moving to something else. Far from
changing an accepted practice, Smalltalk-80's fault was one of doing
things as they had been always done.

-- Jecel