i dug up a document called the
compleat guide to character sets and code sets in metronet
by bill williamms from the old university of london
coimputer centre. the kit at the time was cdc based
6600 and 7600 i think.
sites linked to it had
cdc
ibm
icl
one of the character sets called ebcdic graphic has
no [ or ]
On Wed, 16 Feb 2000 08:53:30 EST [log in to unmask] wrote:
> In a message dated 2/16/2000 2:09:53 AM Pacific Standard Time,
> [log in to unmask] writes:
>
> > I thought that the reason brackets [] and braces {} were not part of the
> > Fortran character set was out of consideration for users of non-English
> > keyboards, where these keys tend to be replaced by letters with accents.
>
> Some of us remember the keypunch machines and even the ASR teletypes which
> didn't have enough characters to afford more than one kind of bracket.
> Fortran worked then, so I supposed that the traditionalists said "What was
> good enough in the past will be good enough in the future."
> >
> > My own feeling is that if [] were to be allowed in Fortran, the best use
> > for them would be around array subscripts, making it much easier to
> > distinguish array references from function calls.
>
> I had to explain the generation of a function call by a typo to a fellow team
> member just this week.
>
> Tim
> [log in to unmask]
-------------------
Ian Chivers
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