ASCII is, as people have pointed out, a 7-bit code, so it can hold only 128 characters. When they added _ and ^ to it in 01967, they had to remove the ← and ↑ characters from ASCII-1963⁂. So there was no space for any of the characters —–“”×÷£°†‡¢§•€, which are absolutely critical even for English. "National variants" of ASCII might allocate space to some of them, or to other characters like ñ which are even more critical to the languages that use them.
If you're interested in how ASCII ended up that way, Tom Jennings wrote an excellent history: <a href="https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/CharCodeHist/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/CharCodeHist/index...
Of course, larger character sets that include ASCII as a subset do keep adding symbols: <a href="https://www.unicode.org/alloc/Pipeline.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.unicode.org/alloc/Pipeline.html and some programming languages do use non-ASCII symbols: <a href="https://docs.raku.org/language/operators" rel="nofollow">https://docs.raku.org/language/operators
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⁂ Smalltalk's continued use of ASCII-1963, among other things so that it could use ← as the assignment operator, is the reason that OO programmers got in the habit of using CamelCase, and are still doing so today, despite using a character set containing the underscore, and, typically, programming languages in which underscores are valid characters
> —–“”×÷£°†‡¢§•€, which are absolutely critical even for English
Assuming that second dash is an en-dash, I've not used the majority of those characters even when handwriting. I would say the quotes I handwrite are closer to symmetrical " quotes, I do still use the multiply but I use a slash for divide, I do use the pound symbol and degree symbol, and I've never used the rest. And I'm from england
behnamoh · · focus · HN ↗
kragen · · focus · HN ↗
If you're interested in how ASCII ended up that way, Tom Jennings wrote an excellent history: <a href="https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/CharCodeHist/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/CharCodeHist/index...
Of course, larger character sets that include ASCII as a subset do keep adding symbols: <a href="https://www.unicode.org/alloc/Pipeline.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.unicode.org/alloc/Pipeline.html and some programming languages do use non-ASCII symbols: <a href="https://docs.raku.org/language/operators" rel="nofollow">https://docs.raku.org/language/operators
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⁂ Smalltalk's continued use of ASCII-1963, among other things so that it could use ← as the assignment operator, is the reason that OO programmers got in the habit of using CamelCase, and are still doing so today, despite using a character set containing the underscore, and, typically, programming languages in which underscores are valid characters
voidUpdate · · focus · HN ↗
Assuming that second dash is an en-dash, I've not used the majority of those characters even when handwriting. I would say the quotes I handwrite are closer to symmetrical " quotes, I do still use the multiply but I use a slash for divide, I do use the pound symbol and degree symbol, and I've never used the rest. And I'm from england
kragen · · focus · HN ↗
voidUpdate · · focus · HN ↗
kragen · · focus · HN ↗