¬ is one of the many 'not' symbols that has been used through history.
As to why UK keyboards include it? Probably IBM, ¬ was the negation/not symbol in Z, it wouldn't surprise me if Hursley Park petitioned the rest of the company to ensure it was on the UK PC layout.
(This Z: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_notation )
Re:If PHP Were British (2011)
by rhinoceraptor on Tuesday May 28, 2019 @01:22PM
(#20032207)
It makes a good EOL character to highlight trailing whitespace.
True, but unicode gives us ⏎ which is pretty unambiguous
The funny spelling of centre always gets me too, it just looks so wrong! I can get used to writing words that end in ise as ize, and colour as color. But center, fiber, liter, etc just don't sit right.
It's just a matter of getting used to. I imagine these spellings do not evoke the same feeling in you, even though they are objectively following the same rule as centre and fibre:
Maple not Mapel
Cable not Cabel
Able not Abel
Here’s my American perspective:
Centre look and sounds like “cent-ruh” rather than the rolled out sounding of err sound to make “center”. Then again, how you say it is a bit different, too.
There are two "US" pronunciations on Wiktionary.
The first is much closer to the British pronunciation, which (I think) is much more deserving of the spelling "centre" than the second "cener".
One thing I'm surprised to have seen only once is use of ¬ as an escape character, because it's so reliably unused for anything at all. (I noticed in the code that this program, which needless to say was written at a UK company, had no way of escaping ¬ itself, presumably because nobody had ever needed that.)
£ also seems a bit underused, but it's fairly specifically the UK's currency symbol, so it's not obvious else you'd use it for.
(But I suspect only UK keyboards have these chars, so it's probably no bad thing.)