Thread

1. behnamoh · 1789918949 · 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. II2II · 1789919982 · focus · HN ↗

      ASCII is a 7-bit code, so there are only so many symbols one can add. Prior to ASCII, you had codes that used as few as 5 bits. Early C had the option to use digraphs to represent various forms of parenthesis, simply because symbols like {} and [] were not universal.

      (Strictly speaking, people did continue adding symbols. We used to talk about code pages: when the MSB was 0, the other 7 bits were ASCII. When the MSB was 1, the other 7 bits were a user selected code pade.)

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