Interesting. I do not remember exactly what system or language I used in collage, but for some reason I thought a { and } was encoded as [[ and ]] or some kind of double character like that. I new Fortran at the time, but that other language needed '{}'.
"In addition to missing lowercase, ASCII 1963 and the Model 33 lacked { } curly braces, | vertical bar, ` backtick, and ~ tilde, and they had ↑ up arrow instead of ^ caret and ← left arrow instead of _ underscore."
explains why Smalltalk used the up arrow and left arrow for fairly reasonable punctuation for return and assignment.
Up arrow was replaced much later by caret and left arrow was sadly replaced by :=
Left arrow was replaced by _, which (in Squeak anyway) is actually an assignment operator, with := as an alias.
Some computers going into the 80s, for example the Commodore 8-bit line starting with the PET and going through the Commodore 128, still had ↑ and ← for ^ and _.
In the words of my combinatorics professor, Dave Bayer:
> It is hard to shed prejudices about how code should look, even if learning to see clearly past convention is the only good reason to be a mathematician. I'm already quite sure how I will die: I'll read another article on Hacker News about a new programming language where I see nothing new, and I'll read that they included {}; to make C programmers comfortable. I'll have a massive stroke.
Interesting. In the 70's & 80's, 8-bit microcomputers had a the same problem as old teletypes: you couldn't type in some ASCII characters even when the computer could display them. (And many couldn't.) At least some home-grown tiny-C compilers allowed a Pascal-like "BEGIN" and "END" substitute, which I'm sure would be an abomination to Kernighan. Even Pascal itself could have a problem: the very popular TRS-80 Tiny Pascal used ( and ) instead of [ ] for arrays because neither brackets nor braces could be typed.
To summarize from the article for { and }:
Modern digraphs:
<% , %>. This is only one that looks symmetric
Less-modern trigraphs:
??< , ??>
Unix v4 (in the teletype driver):
\( , \)
PDP-11 B:
*( , *)
PDP-7 B:
$( , $)
In other micro software (Advanced MuMath for the TRS-80), I have seen:
<< , >> for [ , ]
(< , >) for { , }
Back in the 80's, the joke among new learners of C and Unix is that the designers must have had a very bad keyboard where typing each character was painful, because every keyword or command was so short and cryptic. This article suggests a different reason: on their 36-bit Honeywell 6070, "four characters fit into a word", so there was incentive to fit in 1 machine word.
It also explains why they used the obscure characters {,},|, and ~ while never using the FAR more common # and @. In the Teletype driver, "#" is clear previous char, and "@" is clear current line. So unavailable for C. I will still curse the C designers to my dying day for picking * as the prefix operator for dereference pointer, when the more logical @ character was SITTING RIGHT THERE! On every keyboard! So now every newbie to C has to stop thinking "multiplication" when they see *.
I remember reading Unix source in Geoff Steckel‘s office at Harvard who got the first Unix distribution outside of their labs and the line printer would just would use overstrike on parentheses to designate curly braces and upper case (lower case was printed as upper since the line printer didn’t have lower).
Isn't it odd to read "curly" braces? Every printed dictionary I have, up through the 1990s at least, says that braces are {these}, brackets are [these], and parentheses are (these). Saying "curly brace" is as redundant as saying "round parentheses." Yes, braces are curly, by definition.
At least that's how it always in American English, and ASCII. Apparently British English says more than [these] can be "brackets" and <these> were called "angle brackets" in the 1970s, but when did anyone in the computer industry ever start calling anything but {these} braces?
Did anyone ever actually use trigraphs or digraphs in C? All I ever saw in Sweden (where the most commonly used seven-bit character encoding lacked brackets, braces, backslash and vertical bar) was to just use the same code points and writing int main(int argc, char argvÄÅ) ä ... å, or setting your terminal to use USASCII, l|{v}ng your pl{}n t|xt look}ng l}k| th}s.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 27.4 ms ] threadexplains why Smalltalk used the up arrow and left arrow for fairly reasonable punctuation for return and assignment.
Up arrow was replaced much later by caret and left arrow was sadly replaced by :=
Some computers going into the 80s, for example the Commodore 8-bit line starting with the PET and going through the Commodore 128, still had ↑ and ← for ^ and _.
> It is hard to shed prejudices about how code should look, even if learning to see clearly past convention is the only good reason to be a mathematician. I'm already quite sure how I will die: I'll read another article on Hacker News about a new programming language where I see nothing new, and I'll read that they included {}; to make C programmers comfortable. I'll have a massive stroke.
To summarize from the article for { and }:
Modern digraphs:
Less-modern trigraphs: Unix v4 (in the teletype driver): PDP-11 B: PDP-7 B: In other micro software (Advanced MuMath for the TRS-80), I have seen: Back in the 80's, the joke among new learners of C and Unix is that the designers must have had a very bad keyboard where typing each character was painful, because every keyword or command was so short and cryptic. This article suggests a different reason: on their 36-bit Honeywell 6070, "four characters fit into a word", so there was incentive to fit in 1 machine word.It also explains why they used the obscure characters {,},|, and ~ while never using the FAR more common # and @. In the Teletype driver, "#" is clear previous char, and "@" is clear current line. So unavailable for C. I will still curse the C designers to my dying day for picking * as the prefix operator for dereference pointer, when the more logical @ character was SITTING RIGHT THERE! On every keyboard! So now every newbie to C has to stop thinking "multiplication" when they see *.
At least that's how it always in American English, and ASCII. Apparently British English says more than [these] can be "brackets" and <these> were called "angle brackets" in the 1970s, but when did anyone in the computer industry ever start calling anything but {these} braces?