RE: American English translation of character names

[Arcane Jill]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Eric Scace [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Thursday, December 18, 2003 3:57 PM
> To: John Cowan; Arcane Jill
> Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: RE: American English translation of character names
>
>
>    The logical "not" glyph got into EBCDIC because the
> concept was needed in computer programming.

I'm a programmer, and I'm older than most programmers. I'm old enough to remember punched paper tape ... but not quite old enough to remember punched cards. I am interested in this, though. Could you possibly clarify which computer language used (the EBCDIC equivalent of) U+00AC? I only ask because I'm not aware of one, and I'm intrigued.


>    In the late 1970s the C programming language was one of
> the first to use the glyph "!" to mean logical "not"; e.g.,
> "!=".

"!" is used to mean "logical not" in contexts other than just "not equal". As in, for example: bool b1 = ! b2; (although there wasn't a bool type back then). I remember that BASIC used the keyword "NOT" for the same purpose. C also uses "~" as a "bitwise not".

So ... let me see if I have understood you correctly, because this is a tad confusing (but very interesting). You are saying that ... in the days of punched cards ... there was an EBCDIC code whose meaning was LOGICAL NOT. So far so good - but how would such a character code have been written? Was it written like the U+00AC glyph is now? Or did its visual appearance vary depending on who was writing it? Or ... did it even have a visual appearance at all? I figure that, if it didn't have the visual appearance of the U+00AC glyph then "logical not" would map better to Unicode character U+223C TILDE OPERATOR (also known as "not", according to the code charts) which at least looks like the character mathematicians use. On the other hand, if it did have U+00AC appearance then fair enough.


> etc).  Earlier keyboard languages used a different
> workaround; e.g., "<>" for "not equal".

Yeah, I always wondered why C chose to deploy ! to mean "not". Weird. Maybe they just picked a character at random and said "Ah yes - we'll use that one - no-one else seems to be using it for anything"????

Jill