Re: the meaning of r`.......`

[Thomas Rachel]

Am 23.07.2012 17:59 schrieb Steven D'Aprano:

>> Before you
get a language that uses full Unicode, you'll need to have fairly
generally available keyboards that have those keys.

Or at least keys or key combinations for the stuff you need, which might 
differ e. g. with the country you live in. There are countries which 
have keyboards with äöüß, others with èàéî, and so on.


Or sensible, easy to remember mnemonics for additional characters. Back
in 1984, Apple Macs made it trivial to enter useful non-ASCII characters
from the keyboard. E.g.:

Shift-4 gave $
Option-4 gave ¢
Option-c gave ©
Option-r gave ®

So what? If I type Shift-3 here, I get a § (U+00A7). And the ° (U+00B0) 
comes with Shift-^, the µ (U+00B5) with AltGr-M and the € sign with AltGr+E.

Dead-keys made accented characters easy too:

Option-u o gave ö
Option-u e gave ë


And if I had a useful OS here at work, I even could use the compose key 
to produce many other non-ASCII characters. To be able to create each 
and every of them is not needed in order to have support for them in a 
language, just the needed ones.

Useful editors use them as well, although you have not all of them on 
your keyboard.


Thomas
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