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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?"

1 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!