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I've been doing some of this in my latest prototype; check out http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/smcdirm/managedti... (look at the last few examples; it is not ready so please don't submit it to HN).

A few notes:

We convert () into a box for viewing, but de-convert it back to () when the line is selected for editing.

Unicode (and non-uncide special characters) is used as a rendering for ascii based operators. So >= is rendered as "≥"; however, for editing to work, we add a dot at the end so the character count remains the same, so its actually "≥∙", if you delete the dot, you are basically deleting the ascii "=" so the character becomes ">".

I thought about colors and graphics, but they create huge real estate issues, and they aren't widely applicable. Also, people get what "red" is while the literal color red is quite ambiguous.

Rather than find a new symbol for multiplication, it probably makes more sense to render the single x variable differently (as well as other single variable identifiers like i and j). I haven't implemented this yet, but its on my list.

If you look at the videos, you'll see that static and run-time errors are rendered underneath the tokens they are related to. The idea is to keep the feedback as close to the code as possible.




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