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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. Why? by wowbagger · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Why are we not using characters that are:
    1. Hard to generate on a standard keyboard
    2. Not standardized in the specifications of the language.
    3. Not standardized in the character sets of most non-bitmapped displays.
    4. Not standardized in HTML markup.


    Gosh, I don't know!

    Now, if you will excuse me, I need to create a local variable named <The Symbol for the Artist Formerly Known as "The Artist Formerly Known As Prince">
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