From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Fri Apr 02 2004 - 01:55:19 EST
Arcane Jill wrote:
> Of course, back in the days of the ZX80 (a device which, by the way,
> had its own custom, non-ASCII character set) and its offshoots, there
> was indeed a SPACE LETTER - a character which looked like a space,
> but acted like a letter, so "Louis XVI" could be made to count as a
> single word. It would never line-break. Of course, on the ZX80, all
> characters were fixed-width, but if we imagine a proportional font
> with the same properties, it is clear that SPACE LETTER would no more
> stretch or shrink than would the letter 'K'.
Which character was that? I thought the ZX80 had essentially the same
character set as the ZX81, which had SPACE at 0x00 and no other space
character that I can find.
The ZX81 (known in the U.S. as the Timex Sinclair 1000) had several
types of "characters" -- some were ordinary graphic characters; others
were controls, like NEWLINE and RUBOUT; others were BASIC keywords, like
INKEY$ and GOSUB; then there were the bizarre controls that determined
what mode the cursor was in (Literal, Keyword, Graphics, or Function).
But I can't imagine any of the graphic characters having "properties" in
the Unicode sense such as Jill describes. Concepts like word-counting
and line-breaking were implemented on an app-by-app basis, if at all.
And maybe it's just my lack of creative thinking, but I certainly can't
imagine a proportional font on a ZX80 or ZX81 -- not on that blocky
24-line screen!
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
TS1000 user, 1983-1986
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