Re: if vs. when vs. and: style question

["Pascal J. Bourguignon" <pjb@informatimago.com>]

> On 26 Mar 2015, at 11:43, Gian Uberto Lauri <saint@eng.it> wrote:
> 
> Pascal J. Bourguignon writes:
>> "Gian Uberto Lauri" <saint@eng.it> writes:
>> 
>>> Dan Espen writes:
>>> 
>>>> My mind is made up, but interesting info like how to type Greek
>>>> are one reason why I commented at all.  I think keyboards and
>>>> keys are an important issue and the current state of the art falls
>>>> far short.  Some important keys are completely missing.
>>> 
>>> There are factories producing keyboards with cherry switches and two or
>>> three rows of "L(num)" keys on the right side. They are backlit and some
>>> models have customizable light color.
>> 
>> If you go the keyboard way, then what you want is an Optimus Maximus
>> keyboard.
>> http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/maximus/
> 
> I know it, but it is not mechanical, damn expensive and, AFAIK, not
> GNU/Linux friendly.
> 
>>> Just my 2 cents.
>> 
>> This 2-cents is what leads to Chinese ideograms.
>> 
>> Not really a progress.
> 
> Not this true. AFAIK Chinese (and Arabs - or at least is true in
> Lebanon) do use western keyboard with something that transliterates
> back to their alphabet from a western (English) transliteration. It
> seems they are prevented from using their own mother tongue at the
> hardware level :).

Indeed and this is my point.

Alphabet is a great invention.  

The idea that you can build all the words (all the symbols) of the dictionary from a small set if discrete letters by a simple agglutination rule.

Notice that Korean script is alphabetic, syllabes look like ideograms, but they have actually a simple alphabetic basis, which makes it easy to type.  But this script was defined after the invention of the printing press.

Usual mathematic notation is hieroglyfic.  It doesn't need to be.
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/We-Really-Dont-Know-How-To-Compute
http://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/sicm/book.html

-- 
__Pascal J. Bourguignon__