How long has _ existed? | Hacker News Reader

How long has _ existed?

howoldisit.glitch.me

34 pointszdw14 comments

Disappointed this wasn't an article about the typographical history of the underscore.

Me too. Wikipedia has a pretty good article about it though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underscore

Relevant part:

As early output devices (Teleprinters, CRTs and line printers) could not produce more than one character at a location, it was not possible to underscore text, so early encodings such as ITA2 and the first versions of ASCII had no underscore. IBM's EBCDIC character-coding system, introduced in 1964, added the underscore, which IBM referred to as the "break character".

ASCII added it in 1967.

I hate having to use the underscore instead of the minus sign in code. (I believe I have seen languages that allow using the minus sign to separate words in an identifier, but that might have been in pseudocode.)

It's common in lisp, where -,*,+,/ are names of functions.

Warning: Every keystroke entered into the search field creates a new browser history item.

Notice how theres quite a gap in listings from the 80s to 90s. The rise of the PC coincided with a dark age of innovation in software.

Hard to see there's a gap when it's not really clear what the qualifying criteria are for 'technologies' to be put in that list...

Lots of things missing, Forth, Emacs, VIM, Teco

Plus the browser history spam pointed out by knubie

Interesting to see that employers are looking for brainfuck experience!

And SQLite ?

As of when?

I haven't looked through all of the code, but since they store the (approximate) release date of each technology (https://github.com/jsrn/howoldisit/blob/master/src/technolog...) my guess is that it's "as of the instant you viewed the page".

That's such a pet peeve of mine. They don't know when I'm viewing the page. They only know when the request to render arrives. On longer timescales it's not as important, but still.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com