James Frye <frye@cs.unr.edu> writes:
> If Maxima could represent such characters internally with e.g. the
> appropriate Unicode, and display them according to whatever the
> current display can handle, then the big problem for most of us is
> having a way to input them.
If you use a Unicode capable Lisp, then this pretty much works. Here's
a screen shot of a Maxima session where I used Greek, Cyrillic,
Ethiopean, Hebrew, and Runic variable names:
<http://ifa.au.dk/~harder/uni-maxima.png>;
(Note: This is from a Maxima compiled with CLISP, it won't work with
CMUCL -- I didn't try gcl).
> My keyboard is noticably lacking in Greek characters, and it's much
> easier to remember \\alpha than whatever the multi-character escape
> code is...
I ran it in an Emacs shell where you can select different so called
"input methods". One of them is called 'TeX' -- it works as you'd
expect: if you type "\alpha" you get an alpha etc.