in reply to When I see "10", I think:

Reminds me of college in 1982 when I spent one whole day ferreting out an LC letter L where a One should be amongst reems and reems of greenbar for a Fortran program.

It was a typo that was hard to break, having been deliberately trained to type LC Ls for One and capital O's for Zero on an IBM Selectric typwriter in my high school typing class ten years earlier and having done it all that time prior to college.

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Re^2: When I see "10", I think:
by tobyink (Canon) on Feb 03, 2012 at 00:55 UTC

    Why on Earth did they deliberately train you to do that?!

    It's been a good many years since I've even seen a typewriter, but I can't remember them being constrained to the digits 2 to 9. They had 1 and 0 keys. Why not use them?

[reply]
      Having a separate 1 key was an innovation that came fairly late in the game. Older typewriters didn't have it, and it wasn't until the late 1970s that you could count on it being there. So people were taught to type without it.
[reply]
[d/l]

        Absolutely. My Mum's typewriter had numbers running from 2 till 9, I think. I used a lower case ell for one, and I guess capital oh worked for zero.

        Which reminds me of a textbook on BASIC where the authors insisted that capital oh was always shown with a slash through it, to differentiate it from zero, which was always displayed without a slash. This is backwards to many implementations, since null and zero are similar concepts.

        Of course, if you're Scandinavian, and you already have the letter oh with a slash through it. It's always something.

        .

        Alex / talexb / Toronto

        "Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds

[reply]
        Even with certain fonts these days, it can still be a problem. Numeric one, lower case ell, even an uppercase eye can (in some sans-serif fonts like Arial) look very close to the same.
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Re^2: When I see "10", I think:
by chacham (Prior) on Feb 02, 2012 at 16:54 UTC
    When you say "LC letter", i think Lewis Carrol letter. Then again, with his games and math, he might have enjoyed our little poll.
[reply]

      And when I see LC, I think of inductance and capacitance, since I recently helped my step-son out with the odd electronics and software questions while he was at Ryerson. Yep, still remember that stuff from university in the 70's and 80's.

      Alex / talexb / Toronto

      "Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds

[reply]

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