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Comment by fulltimeloser | Hacker News Reader

The ASCII character set standardization and subsequent keyboards has had a huge impact on programming languages. Characters not found on a standard keyboard are hardly ever used. And if thy are, it cause lots of issues, because they are so hard to type. I hope we get cheap reconfigurable keyboards with oled key caps in the near future. It could revitalize programming language design using a more powerful syntax with symbols etc.

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People will use something like |> and make a ligature for it in the font, that looks like this ▷. and that's it. However, have you seen this: https://fluxkeyboard.com

They'll do it now, the same way in some ST's you wrote := and it got translated to a left-pointing-arrow.

Let's not forget that in the early 80's, more than 8 bits per character was something that almost never happened.

Objectworks (iirc) used := but left it as is ie 'untranslated'

The first Smalltalk-80 used still required the left arrow for assignment.

It was a real PITA because it was underbar (_, shift-dash) on the keyboard iirc.

Any assignment made me want to drink, thus the character name.

Cuis smalltalk has left arrow gliph for assignement assigned to underbar. I did not know it is historically accurate, thanks! :raises his cup:

In some equipment, like the Teletype Model 33[1], you had left arrow and up arrow instead of _ and ^. This was part of the 1963 draft of ASCII, but was changed in the final version. In the early 1980s there was still a lot of equipment by DEC and Xerox stuck with the original version, which was what the creators of Smalltalk-80 were familiar with.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit-paired_keyboard

Having lived part of the early history, I'd counter that this was a very good thing indeed. ASCII provided some sanity and allowed ideas to spread and proliferate.

We can revisit the character sets now that Unicode is ubiquitous. As for typing non-ASCII characters, that has been daily practices for decades _outside_ of north America.

Eh, wait. Maybe for comments and strings, but we, the non-ASCII language users such as Spanish, avoided to put ñ's and accented chars as _code_ almost as a religious dogma.

Tildes in Spanish are just used to mark the stressed syllabe when it's outside the stressing rules, and the diaeresis it's to make the 'u' non silent in gue/gui/que/qui. So if we read "funcion" without being written "función", don't worry, we aren't writting a literary test, it's code.

I'd hate to debug code written in Chinese instead of English, even if English it's a language I just use in academical and technical environments (and some nerdy games translated from Japanese or classical retro games from Unix workstations, playing either Trek or Slashem it's not reading Oscar Wilde or Shakespeare). And Golang allows that I think, and lots of languages too.

Believe you meant to write that _accents_ are used to mark stress that's outside the normal rules

That's what I meant.

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