And... > That makes it really hard to render into ascii, which is one of the many reasons I think it's a bad idea. ...this is one idea that I really dislike.

And... > That makes it really hard to render into ascii, which is one of the many reasons I think it's a bad idea. ...this is one idea that I really dislike. We have touchscreens everywhere, soon 3D glasses everywhere, a whole plethora of input devices, and at some point we'll have usable direct electric bran-computer-interfaces. Why limit to ASCII?! Heck, even 3D is not enough in my mind - you can "easily" imagine RGB color displayed on 3D objects as a secondary attached 3D space, hence boom, you can "easily" (probably not for most, but with enough training doable) visualize 4 (3 space + 1 time) + 3 (r, g, b) = 7 dimensions using sight alone! Heck even programming languages should move away from 1.5D text. I can't wait to see the first really cool visual syntaxes. I imagine that the Perl 6 equivalent of a visual 2D/3D programming language combined with a more useful input device than a keyboard would look awe inspiring! Imagine how cool would it be to play with 7D mathematical notations and to what cool insights they will lead :) (though for teaching and publication 2D is probably enough for math as the cool thing about math is still that you can do it with just pen and paper or in you head while using the 3D-processing part of your mind do things like walk on the street...)