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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?"

2 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. Two questions: by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    1. Do you own Wikipedia stock?
    2. even though the Mac brought GUI's to the masses -- brought GUI's what to the masses? Poor GUI - what if he didn't want his possessions to be widespread?

    </smartass>

    --
    Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
  2. Troll Article? by slashflood · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    That's one of the worst Ask Slashdot articles ever - it almost tops this one. Is it meant to be a troll? What exactly is the connection between your question about special character sets and the link to Wikipedias "Apple Macintosh" entry? Apple fanboyism?

    Back to your question: What should be included in the special character sets? Do we need a set for every programming/markup language?