Yes, so many things we think of as normal now were caused by a lack of characters in ASCII and its predicesors. Why not use × for multiplication and ÷ for division, since they are in the common Latin-1 8-bit character set? I mean, isn't it time we moved beyond 7 bits?

Now we think of * as meaning multiply, when originally it was an available substitute because character 0xD7 didn't exist yet.

You could also use → for dereference and ← for assignment (as early Algol-family languages originally wanted!), if only the fonts weren't drawn so terribly.

—John

Hmm... I know that's worked before, so why are characters with high bit set (multi-byte in UTF-8 encoding) showing up as sequences in the preview window? Looking at HTML source, there is no meta tag for charset present. Works fine as entities, though, but much harder to type!

In reply to Re: Re: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Tolerate the Dot by John M. Dlugosz
in thread Dots and cargo-cult programming by bikeNomad

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