Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev

[Chuck Guzis]

On 11/27/18 6:23 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:

> I love the use of an arrow for assignment.  In teaching, a student's
> FIRST encounter with programming can be daunting.  Use of an equal sign
> immediately runs up against the long in-grained concept of commutative
> equality.  You would be surprised how many first time students try to
> say 3 = X .  Then, of course,
> N = 1
> N = N + 1
> is a mathematical "proof by induction" that all numbers are equal!
> (Don't let a mathematician see that, or the universe will cease to
> exist, and be replaced by something even more inexplicable!)

It's worth noting that in 1963 ASCII, hex 5E was the up-arrow (now the
circumflex) and hex 5F was the left-arrow (now underline).

It's also worth nothing that in the original CDC 6-bit display code,
there were symbols, not only for left-to-right arrow, but not equals,
logical OR and AND, up- and down-arrow, equivalence, logical NOT,
less-than-or-equal, and greater-than-or equal--pretty much the original
Algool-60 special characters.

--Chuck