Mathematica-style long-number text delimiters

[dilijev]

A la Mathematica, for long numbers, delimiting sets of three digits [possibly different number of digits by locale] by a small amount of whitespace. e.g. "1023" becomes "1 023" / "2111230496" becomes "2 111 230 496" (much more readable, and easier to see the magnitude, which makes it easier to identify and correct mistakes in calculations).

Since the input line is plain text, this is obviously a lot more easily done if a non-fixed-width font is being used for input lines, so this should be an opt-in feature.

As a technical issue, whitespace between tokens is of no consequence in inputs, correct? This would be pretty easy to implement because the text displayed could be sent through a filter to remove white-space and then sent directly along to maxima, with all whitespace removed.

On the other hand, continued editing of the selection might be easier if there were a distinction between the input string and the displayed text.

I think I have an idea of how to tackle this so I'll start working on it.