On: Some useful regular expressions for programmers

[marcosdumay]

There are many languages pushing for mathematical style formulas, but until they get easy to type, I don't think any of them will succeed.

It's not COBOL that won. It's qwerty.

[eigenspace → marcosdumay]

Julia makes typing unicode characters very easy; so easy that I keep a Julia repl open a lot of the time just for typing various mathematical symbols easily.

For example, to type α², you just type \alpha, hit the tab button to turn it into α, and then type \^2 and hit tab again to turn that into ².

If someone gives you a unicode character that you don't know how to type, you just hit the ? button to enter the repl-help mode and then paste the character in.

    help?> α²
    "α²" can be typed by \alpha<tab>\^2<tab>

    search:

    Couldn't find α²

      No documentation found.

      Binding α² does not exist.

[snicker7 → eigenspace]

The amazing thing about this UI is that it just works across many of different editors and REPLs (VSCode, Emacs, Pluto, &etc).

It reminds me of GNU TeXMacs, which has a similar interface for equations. That is, typing "\int" followed by tab will render an integral sign.