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Why Haven't Special Character Sets Caught On?

Posted by Cliff on from the because-then-we'd-need-special-keyboards dept.

theodp asks: "Almost forty years after Kenneth Iverson's APL\360 employed neat Selectric hacks to implement Special Character Sets to express operators with a single symbol, we're still using clunky notation like '<>', '^=', or 'NE' to represent inequality and cryptic escape sequences like '\n' to denote a new line, even though the Mac brought GUI's to the masses more than twenty years ago. Why?"

4 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. Argh! Here's another reason! by Kelson · · Score: 4, Funny

    I entered an actual not-equal sign in that post, and Slashcode stripped it out!

  2. YOU might be by DrSkwid · · Score: 2, Funny

    my OS is where UTF8 [pdf] was invented.

    --
    There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
  3. Re:Which characters by AuMatar · · Score: 2, Funny

    No, you have the right font. Thats what perl always looks like.

    --
    I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
  4. Take no RISCs by mnmn · · Score: 2, Funny

    Have a large number of individual characters rather than a few characters than can be combined in many ways?

    Why you sound like youre in favor of CISC.

    --
    "Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky