On Tue, Sep 12, 2000 at 07:27:07AM -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
>
> Semicolon was not picked because it's the LISP comment
> character, the square brackets are not in REBOL because
> they're found in FORTH, the reason for their use is based on
> their position on the keyboard (home row) and the fact that
> they are UNSHIFTED!! People will be typing these things ALOT
> so they'd better be conveniently located and easy to hit.
>
> REBOL doesn't want your fingers to hurt.
The fingers of Americans anyway. German fingers are supposed to hurt,
I guess :-).
On a German keyboard the ";" is shifted. It is on top of the "," key. The
"<"/">" are on a separate key. It is even worse for "["/"]", because a German
keyboard does not have these characters directly accessible at all. It has
A-umlaut and U-umlaut in those places (corresponding to the ASCII character
positions of "["/"]", which in the now-obsolete German 7-bit ISO encoding had
been replaced with those umlauts). Most keyboards let you enter "["/"]" as
Alt-A-Umlaut and Alt-U-Umlaut, but, of course, pressing the Alt key is even
more awkard than pressing the Shift key. There are even some older computer
systems which don't have "["/"]" in their German versions at all (e.g. German
localized versions of 8-bit systems like Commodore-64) or which don't usually
provide keyboards that have "["/"]" keys on them (e.g. Wang VS).
> Everyone essentially got the answer right-- A+! :-)
Or "1+" in German grades. Of course everyone's grade for "international awareness"
would be a little lower :-).
--
Holger Kruse
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
