Bummer, no attachments...
paul
> On Apr 26, 2022, at 5:14 PM, Paul Koning via cctalk <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>
>
>> On Apr 26, 2022, at 4:41 PM, ben via cctalk <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> ...
>> PS: Did any common I/O devices have the ALGOL symbols Less than or Equals,
>> Greater than or equals , not , arrows and other misc symbols?
>
> Yes, the Flexowriters at TU Eindhoven used to punch ALGOL programs for the
> Electrologica X8 machine there (late 1960s through early 1970s). As I
> recall, Dijkstra made some comment somewhere about the usefulness of being
> able to specify your own character set.
>
> Those machines had upper/lower case letters, several special character such
> as the logic symbols not, or, and, the subscript 10 for exponential notation
> numbers, plus non-escaping underline and vertical bar. The underline was
> used for keywords, so the ALGOL keyword "begin" was keyed as _b_e_g_i_n. It
> would also make several other special characters, for example _= (underlined
> equal) is the Boolean equivalence operator, and _ followed by the not symbol
> gives you the "implies" operator, and _< is less-or-equal. The vertical bar
> would also make several overstruck symbols, for example |= becomes not-equal,
> | followed by the and symbol is uparrow (for exponentiation). The local
> inventions |< and |> were used for string quotes.
>
> Here's a sample of what it would look like printed on the Flexowriter. The
> line printers were upper-case only; they'd print lower case letters as upper
> case, upper case letters overprinted with a period. Ugh...
>
> paul
>
