Arcane Jill wrote: > Of course, back in the days of the ZX80 (a device which, by the way, > had its own custom, non-ASCII character set) and its offshoots, there > was indeed a SPACE LETTER - a character which looked like a space, > but acted like a letter, so "Louis XVI" could be made to count as a > single word. It would never line-break. Of course, on the ZX80, all > characters were fixed-width, but if we imagine a proportional font > with the same properties, it is clear that SPACE LETTER would no more > stretch or shrink than would the letter 'K'.
Which character was that? I thought the ZX80 had essentially the same character set as the ZX81, which had SPACE at 0x00 and no other space character that I can find. The ZX81 (known in the U.S. as the Timex Sinclair 1000) had several types of "characters" -- some were ordinary graphic characters; others were controls, like NEWLINE and RUBOUT; others were BASIC keywords, like INKEY$ and GOSUB; then there were the bizarre controls that determined what mode the cursor was in (Literal, Keyword, Graphics, or Function). But I can't imagine any of the graphic characters having "properties" in the Unicode sense such as Jill describes. Concepts like word-counting and line-breaking were implemented on an app-by-app basis, if at all. And maybe it's just my lack of creative thinking, but I certainly can't imagine a proportional font on a ZX80 or ZX81 -- not on that blocky 24-line screen! -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/ TS1000 user, 1983-1986
