I'm extremely wroth with the founders of ASCII for failing to include "degree". 
 

But then it isn't on the American keyboard either, and I think that's what they 
took as a guide.  The manual typist would use a lower-case "o" half a line 
high.  (A typewriter spaced on picas[1], but the platen clicked on half-picas.  
The return lever would turn it two clicks.)  

But then really-old typewriters didn't have "1" and "!" either (which explains 
why those two characters are on the same key).  An 'l' looks exactly like a 
"1", and you can make a "!" by holding down the space bar to prevent the 
carriage from advancing while you type "." and "'".  

Come to think of it, when writing HTML, I still use a superscript "o" for the 
degree sign.  I wonder whether some browsers render it "^o".

[1]  A pica is twelve points, a point is 1/72 inch or about .3 mm.  

-- 
Joy Beeson
http://home.earthlink.net/~joybeeson/
http://home.earthlink.net/~dbeeson594/ROUGHSEW/ROUGH.HTM 
http://home.earthlink.net/~beeson_n3f/ 
west of Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.A.
where it might snow for the first time this fall.

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