Yes, so many things we think of as normal now were caused by a lack of characters in ASCII and its predicesors. Why not use × for multiplication and ÷ for division, since they are in the common Latin-1 8-bit character set? I mean, isn't it time we moved beyond 7 bits?

Now we think of * as meaning multiply, when originally it was an available substitute because character 0xD7 didn't exist yet.

You could also use → for dereference and ← for assignment (as early Algol-family languages originally wanted!), if only the fonts weren't drawn so terribly.

—John

Hmm... I know that's worked before, so why are characters with high bit set (multi-byte in UTF-8 encoding) showing up as sequences in the preview window? Looking at HTML source, there is no meta tag for charset present. Works fine as entities, though, but much harder to type!