On Wed, Jan 19, 2022 at 10:12:23AM +1100, Chris Angelico wrote:

> Not sure about Python, but C and C++ have digraphs and trigraphs as
> alternatives for certain symbols, specifically because some
> OS/keyboard/language combinations may not be able to easily type the
> originals.

I believe that those C digraphs date back to days when ASCII was not a 
guaranteed lowest common denominator, and there were computers that did 
not support characters such as braces {}. And then C++ just inherited 
them from C.

Pascal had the same thing: comments were either {comment} or (*comment*) 
specifically because in the 1970s there were lots of computers and OSes 
that did not support braces. It wasn't until the early 80s that the 
ASCII character set became more or less universally supported in the 
English-speaking world.


> > Okay. Without looking it up, how would *you* type ⟮ U+27EE "Mathematical
> > Left Flattened Parentheses"? On your honour now, don't look it up.
> 
> Be careful: don't give people the codepoint number in these
> challenges, because a lot of input systems let you enter any character
> by keying in the codepoint.

So David has made it clear.


> Here's a better challenge: Type five unique open parenthesis signs,
> without looking up their key sequences or codepoints.

Yes :-)



-- 
Steve
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