At 07:14 PM 7/11/02 -0700, Doug Ewell wrote: >Programming languages, notably C and its offspring, have appropriated >these characters for their own purposes. You can't really blame "users" >for that.
I'm not sure you can blame anyone for that. If you're going to waste keys on my keyboard for ^, ~ and `, and waste 3 out of 94 graphical characters in ASCII for them, I'm going to find a use. Next time you design a universal character set, take more care. (-; >Except, of course, for any additional user confusion that might have >arisen from encoding three more lookalike "spoof buddies." The spoofing problem already exists; adding a few more, with valid reasons, really isn't going to change anything. Note that ~ and arguably ^ don't spoof SPACING COMBINING TILDE and SPACING COMBINING CIRCUMFLEX. (Why did Latin-1 and Unicode persist in encoding more of these, BTW? /Character backspace spacing mark/ was illegal in both of them, and I've never seen them used for what was overtly their purpose.)
