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?
