Re:But What's Up with That ¥?
by kiryin on Friday November 12, 2021 @03:36AM
(#29197362)
It's pretty cool. When you think about it, the backslash is kind of a useless character, apart from windows paths and escapes I can't think of much use for it, both of which are rather arbitrary. As far as I know it has no real use in writing. I wouldn't be opposed to replacing it with something else and making room for something useful on the keyboard.
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I'm actually curious about the history of the backslash character. It does seem that it's something that isn't needed, and is not part of normal English writing, so I wonder how it made it into ASCII. Was it already in regular use in teletype? Was it used in technical writing in the 70's? Was it useful for formatting telegrams or something?
I think the purpose was to allow the symbols for logical and and or: /\ \/
fascinating. So the original ASCII was already conceptualized in terms of composed characters, that's kind of amazing. Maybe it was viewed as "saving" a bit, only having to introduce one character instead of two. Shows the importance of programming language design even that early in computing history.