RE: American English translation of character names

From: Eric Scace (eric@scace.org)
Date: Thu Dec 18 2003 - 14:03:56 EST

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    Hi Jill --

       I'll try to answer your questions.

       Yes, I did both cards and punched paper tape as a teenager. In fact, I used paper tape on Teletype Corp model 33 ASR teleprinter
    machines. Sigh: didn't even think I was dating myself that badly *grin*. I was lucky: my father got involved in computer
    programming very early on and he was thoughtful enough to teach me a couple of languages, carry my card decks to work, bring
    print-outs home, etc. Slow turnaround but... Mechanical teleprinter machines were a special treat for me. I fell in love with
    them as a 14 year old kid when I saw them at the local meteorological office. I got some of my own around age 16, and learned out
    to maintain and repair them. When I got to college, I earned a lot of spending money as a free-lance repairman for all those Model
    33 and 35 Teletype machines used as computer consoles in laboratories around campus.

       As best as I recall, some versions of IBM 360 FORTRAN compilers and PL/C used the not symbol. It was represented on punched
    cards as a an L-shaped character. Imagine an uppercase L, rotated 90? clockwise, and then reflected around the vertical axis so
    that the downward stroke is on the right. I haven't looked at the U+00AC glyph to see if it is the same. If it is necessary to
    come up with some historical references, I'll check my college programming course material. I think the keypunch machines that
    produced the cards were known as IBM 2714s.

       I think C chose "!" as the negation operator (to be precise) because it was a widely-available glyph on common keyboards which
    did not yet have a meaning assigned to it. But it's all a bit arbitrary, this assignment of programming operators to glyphs.

       And... on the other aspects of the thread about keyboard layouts... laptop keyboards are often laid out rather differently when
    it comes to the less frequently used punctuation and diacritical marks. This makes it quite entertaining when one jumps between
    American, German, Finnish and French laptop computers, as I was forced to do on a recent trip to Albania.

    -- Eric Scace

    -----Original Message-----
    From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org]On Behalf Of Arcane Jill
    Sent: 2003 December 18 11:36
    To: unicode@unicode.org
    Subject: RE: American English translation of character names

    > -----Original Message-----
    > From: Eric Scace [mailto:eric@scace.org]
    > Sent: Thursday, December 18, 2003 3:57 PM
    > To: John Cowan; Arcane Jill
    > Cc: unicode@unicode.org
    > Subject: RE: American English translation of character names
    >
    >
    > The logical "not" glyph got into EBCDIC because the
    > concept was needed in computer programming.

    I'm a programmer, and I'm older than most programmers. I'm old enough to remember punched paper tape ... but not quite old enough to
    remember punched cards. I am interested in this, though. Could you possibly clarify which computer language used (the EBCDIC
    equivalent of) U+00AC? I only ask because I'm not aware of one, and I'm intrigued.

    > In the late 1970s the C programming language was one of
    > the first to use the glyph "!" to mean logical "not"; e.g.,
    > "!=".

    "!" is used to mean "logical not" in contexts other than just "not equal". As in, for example: bool b1 = ! b2; (although there
    wasn't a bool type back then). I remember that BASIC used the keyword "NOT" for the same purpose. C also uses "~" as a "bitwise
    not".

    So ... let me see if I have understood you correctly, because this is a tad confusing (but very interesting). You are saying that
    ... in the days of punched cards ... there was an EBCDIC code whose meaning was LOGICAL NOT. So far so good - but how would such a
    character code have been written? Was it written like the U+00AC glyph is now? Or did its visual appearance vary depending on who
    was writing it? Or ... did it even have a visual appearance at all? I figure that, if it didn't have the visual appearance of the
    U+00AC glyph then "logical not" would map better to Unicode character U+223C TILDE OPERATOR (also known as "not", according to the
    code charts) which at least looks like the character mathematicians use. On the other hand, if it did have U+00AC appearance then
    fair enough.

    > etc). Earlier keyboard languages used a different
    > workaround; e.g., "<>" for "not equal".

    Yeah, I always wondered why C chose to deploy ! to mean "not". Weird. Maybe they just picked a character at random and said "Ah
    yes - we'll use that one - no-one else seems to be using it for anything"????

    Jill



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