I personally wish for a degree symbol key. Except in programming (where we could have picked other options) who uses ~,`,,|, or _?
As for the keys mentioned above: I personally hate that, to get good fractions, one has to put up with the clumsy slash that I was always told was a workaround, or use special software. Or, of course, the worst option:
1 2 11
- + - = --
3 5 15
But just ½ and ¼ wouldn’t be useful. I wish I could just put one small number atop another. The best I’ve done is
1
3
I forgot to mention in my OP that I use a nifty little freeware program called AllChar that not only lets you insert fractions, but accent marks and a host of other characters with just a keystroke or two.
I have a 1930’s manual typewriter and it has a key with 1/2 and 1/4. I think the question should be, why did those typewriters have that key? With the complexity of physical machinery, it seems a waste to include a key for that which can so easily be done by just typing number-slash-number. My typewriter doesn’t have a key for exclamation point. I have to do single-quote backspace period to make an !. I use ! much more than 1/2 or 1/4 and would much rather prefer they’d include a key like !.
Bingo. Also common on American typewriters was the cent-sign (¢), which wasn’t in ASCII, and therefore didn’t make it to computer keyboards.
Also, going in the other direction, certain characters like square brackets and curly braces were almost unknown on typewriter keyboards, but were put on computer keyboards because those characters were in ASCII.
Those stupid symbols screw up XML in UTF-8 format. I don’t even want to think about how many times I’ve had to search and destroy them in databases from someone cutting and pasting.
If your software can’t handle Unicode in one of its many variant encodings, fix your software. The French, Russians, Japanese, Chinese, and Indians of the world are sick of having to mangle their names because the only character set you support is only marginally adequate for English and Hawaiian, and not even all of English.
If you are using software than can’t handle any Unicode encoding, use better software.
On Linux (well Ubuntu Linux, not sure about other distros), you can hold the “Alt Gr” key and press number keys, or “Alt Gr” + Shift and number keys, to get fractions
You can configure Linux to input text in all kinds of weird ways. For example, I prefer the ‘compose key’ system, where to enter a non-ASCII character I hit ScrLk (which I have remapped to be a compose key) and then two normal keys which get ‘composed’ into one in some semi-obvious fashion. For example, ½ is ScrLk, then 1, then 2, and ő is ScrLk, then o, then =.
I wonder why this method isn’t more popular. It’s certainly very mnemonic.
Surely part of the issue here is that (except in word processing contexts), numbers entered into a computer often need to be in a format suitable for calculation. There’s no reason why a computer can’t interpret (6½ + 3.53)/5¾, but it’s harder to implement.
Mainly, it was a lot harder to implement back when the people writing compilers now learned it, and they still haven’t quite internalized just how universal Unicode is yet. On the face of it, looking at it from a purely modern perspective where you can assume Unicode support on all targets of interest, it isn’t that much more difficult.
I suppose I should correct myself a bit here: The fact of it is, rational numbers are surprisingly rare in mainstream programming languages. Whole numbers are common, floating-point numbers (a bizarre attempt to represent a section of the reals) are common, but true fractional values can rarely be represented without leaning on some external library, and the ironclad rule in most languages is that libraries aren’t allowed to introduce new syntax. (At most, they can give new semantics to existing syntax.)
Therefore, the drive to introduce notation specific to a data type most programmers don’t expect to have as standard is fairly low.
(This doesn’t explain why languages with support for rational values in their core, like Common Lisp and Scheme, don’t use the Unicode characters. Those languages’ long pre-Unicode history does.)
Looks like XP and later has something called Character Map, which lets you scroll through and pick out special characters. But that’s time-consuming. Before that, there was Extended ASCII that you could access right from the keyboard. It consisted of holding down the ALT key while pressing a 4-digit sequence. For the repetition of a few characters, it was easy enough to remember. For example:
ALT-0188 = ¼
ALT-0189 = ½
ALT-0162 = ¢
ALT-0176 = ° (degrees)
and many others. Only problem is, you HAVE to use the numeric keypad, not the numbers across the top of your keyboard. But experiment with yours to find the characters you want to use most often. It ranges from ALT-0130 thru ALT-0255.
