The surprisingly subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language

Re:The surprisingly subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed h... by crazygringo on Sunday November 05, 2023 @03:27PM (#38155306)

Indeed. In hindsight, the tilde (~), backtick (`) and caret (^) turned out to be useless for their original purposes in ASCII -- they'd been used on typewriters to overprint accents, but you couldn't overprint on a computer screen. Same with the underscore (_). While the backslash (\) was a truly strange mark that IBM included for "reverse division", apparently to support ALGOL logical operations ("\/" and "/\").

In hindsight the underscore and backslash been useful in computing, so I'd say we'd have done better to use the tilde and backtick slots for completing pairs of curly quotes instead! Of course, hindsight being 20/20 and all that...

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Re:The surprisingly subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed h... by cubefox on Sunday November 05, 2023 @04:09PM (#38155675)

I think even underscore and backslash weren't necessary in computing, even though they were put to use once they were there. The @ was also really not necessary. And a lot of those invisible characters weren't either. We should have had just one line break character, since the distinction between CR and LF makes no sense for computers, and certainly caused a lot of incompatibility. As you said, hindsight...

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Re:The surprisingly subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed h... by WalterBright on Sunday November 05, 2023 @04:12PM (#38155697)

CR and LF made sense for mechanical printers.

LF was used a lot for glass editors connected at low baud rates.

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