27 Nov
2018
27 Nov
'18
8:27 p.m.
On Tue, 27 Nov 2018, Sean Conner via cctalk wrote:
It was thus said that the Great Keelan Lightfoot via
cctalk once stated:
In fact, typewriters have more flexibility than
computers do even today.
Within the restriction of a typewriter (only characters and spaces) you
could use the back-space key (which did not erase the previous
character) and re-type the same character to get a bold effect. You could
back-space and hit the underscore to get underlined text. You could
back-space and hit the ` key to get a grave accent, and the ' to get an
acute accent. With a bit more fiddling with the back-space and adjusting
the paper via the platten, you could get umlauts (either via the . or '
keys).
But, doing superscripts required a steady hand.
Hence, half a century ago, many physicists changed
6.02 x 10[superscript]23 into
6.02 E 23
I think the original intent of the BS control
character in ASCII was to
facilitate this behavior, but alas, nothing ever did. Shame, it's a neat
concept.
There was word processing software around 1980 that would do underlining
wither through backspacing, or through Carriage Return WITHOUT Linefeed.
also bold, overstrike, slashed zeroes, etc.
> I like the C comment example; Why do I need to call out a comment with
> a special sequence of letters? Why can't a comment exist as a comment?
Why not a language even more self-documenting than COBOL, wherein the main
body is text, and special markers to identify the CODE that corresponds?