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Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 2: The Mac side

163 points · 89 comments · zdw

  1. behnamoh · · focus · HN ↗
    I wonder why people stopped adding symbols to ASCII. The number row on Macs is just these characters:

        ~!@#$%^&*()_+
    And every programming language uses a subset of these. But why these symbols? Why didn't people add more symbols to the keyboard?
    1. kevin_thibedeau · · focus · HN ↗
      ASCII is 7-bit and fully filled out. Every other extended character system prior to Unicode was sporadically supported. C has digraphs and trigraphs because even the ASCII punctuation wasn't guaranteed to be available on all keyboards. IBM, notably had an APL typeball for their Selectric derived terminals but that was equivalent to switching character sets and not something that could be considered universal prior to Unicode.
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