Hacker News Reader

Comment by aleku | Hacker News Reader

Was this "M{kel{_Juhani_NOK@smail.elisa.fi" an effort to mask your address from scrappers? I cannot imagine there were many scrappers back then.

View on HN

Because 7-bit ASCII didn't include accented characters used in many European langauges, there were national changes. The Finnish variant replaced {|}[\] with äöåÄÖÅ.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Replacement_Character...

One might guess the people who decided on this replacement were not Unix programmers...

The lack of brackets, caret, tilde and other ASCII special characters on various localized keyboards was a real problem in the 1980s. The C language standard solved it by introducing trigraphs:

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/C_Programming/C_trigraph

You can still write valid C using ??< instead of {, and so on. This feature will be removed from the C standard in a couple of years though.

Of course you could still use {} etc, they just might show up as localized characters in your source code. There was no character set conversion involved at the source code level, your terminal font just might have had the glyph for ä in the place of {.

The people who designed the Finnish keyboard layout were definitely not programmers, though: https://kbdlayout.info/KBDFI/

Ditto with the Spanish (es) layout, they layout looks more apt for journalist and writters than programmers. I just switch to the us keymap with the compose key bound to right menu/right win key, so I can type áéíóú with compose key + ' + vowel (not pressed at the same time). Ñ is more cumbersome (compose key + ~ + n) but I can adapt XCompose under BSD/Linux for that.

There is a special place in hell for the unknown inventor of the AZERTY layout still in use today in Belgium and France.

https://kbdlayout.info/kbdbe

Imagine being called to a parents' friend to fix their computer, faking a QWERTY keyboard and trying hard not to look at the keys...

Which, btw, is why those symbols are acceptable as IRC nicknames (and why { is lowercase [, i.e., {some|one} and [some\one] are two equivalent nicknames). IRC was invented in Finland.

You'll notice the same replacements in their signature (though you might miss it, it's off on the right).

The file was probably actually written in something like codepage 1018: 0x7B is ä there rather than {.

Looks like an decoding error for the Finnish special characters

Reply on news.ycombinator.com