Why Haven't Special Character Sets Caught On?

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?"

Comments

Why?

[wowbagger]

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">

Listen to me

[Profane MuthaFucka]

Now sonny, sit down a second and listen to grandpa rant about the good old days. The truth is, when I talk about the good old days, it's not because the days were actually good. It's because I have a sucky memory and questionable taste.

Now it is TRUE that I once did do programming in APL. This was on an old Zenith 8088 based PC clone with 640K of memory, a CGI display, and a 20 meg hard drive. The system itself worked rather well. If you could work a line editor, the development environment was all you could want. The problem was all the little stickers that went on the keys. Every key mapped to about three other symbols besides the normal ones, and just about every key had a little sticker on it. It was NOT fun. Just because your computers can display characters that look like Chinese doesn't mean that it's a good idea.