The name of this course is amusingly similar to one offered at CMU, "Great Theoretical Ideas in Computer Science", the content seems similar as well. Perhaps MIT was inspired by it?

[1]: http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/15-251/

The course is copied from CMU's. I have a friend who TAed the first iteration of the MIT course and was a former 251 ta @ CMU. The goal of the mit course was to offer their students the same experience as CMU's class because it was highly successful and they relied heavily on my friend's experiences as a tax at cmu to build the course.

In general, I view this as a good thing. Universities should take the best material they can find and offer them to students even if it's not original.

This was one of the greatest courses I took at CMU, when Dr Stephen Rudich lectured. The course's fame derived not only from the challenging material, but all the stories and magic tricks Dr Rudich would perform. It's not clear from the MIT course description if the latter is included.

Check the dates: the MIT course is "As taught in 2008".

CMU's "Great Theoretical Ideas in Computer Science" (formerly known as "How to Think Like a Computer Scientist") dates back to at least 2003 and possibly earlier. It's fairly infamous. It would not be surprising if MIT's drew inspiration from it, nor would it be wrong if it did.

This is amazing! Any idea if this is possible in vim?

Without changing the order of symbols, you can at least display some symbols as unicode with vanilla Vim. Here's an extract of my Lisp Vim config, which replaces lambda by λ :

  set conceallevel=2
  syntax keyword lispFunc lambda conceal cchar=λ

The best way I know to do it for Haskell is to use haskellConceal ( http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=3200 ), it display unicode characters but left the underlying ASCII untouched.

There seems to be a plugin called unicode-haskell[1] for Vim. However, as I am obviously not a Vim user, I don't really know anything about it.

[1]: https://github.com/frerich/unicode-haskell

Thanks this is exactly what I need, should make coding in functional languages a lot more readable. Actually it appears GHC supports the use of unicode characters for operators via packages and an extension[1], if it wasn't for your post I would not have discovered this, cheers!

[1]: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Unicode-symbols

I wouldn't recommend using that one. There is a newer plugin [1] that uses "after" in combination with conceal syntax to achieve the same effect but without buffer hacks on load/save.

[1] https://github.com/vim-scripts/Haskell-Conceal

Haskell-Conceal also works a lot better than unicode-haskell: it doesn't erroneously turn "\n" into "λn", and it replaces :: with a single-glyph equivalent so that signature and definition line up nicely.

Having said that, I still prefer <- and -> to ← and →, at least on screen: those Unicode arrowheads are too small on all the fixed-width fonts I've ever seen.

Those arrows are indeed pesky. In my fixed-width fonts (at least at the font size I'm using), → (->) and ⇒ (=>) look the same.

Seems I should've refreshed before posting (now deleted)! As you can see from the plugin file, applying the maps isn't all that complicated, though it certainly would be nice to have it built in. I'm not an emacs user, but I seem to recall using this feature before... anyone know if TextMate had this implemented?

Combining :abbr and conceal could indeed reduce quite a lot of verbosity from JavaScript for instance.