Anto'nio Martins-Tuva'lkin <antonio at tuvalkin dot web dot pt> wrote:
> Anyway -- it was space for three wholes, the small whole for the > tractor wheel, and space for four more, IIRC. > > |O OoOO | > ... > > Any bells ringing? Wouldn't this be a nice "complete" set of chars to > be encoded, a la Braille patterns?... This is not so much a script as a UTF. (In fact, Ken Whistler has already done something similar as a joke; search the Unicode mailing list archives for "BTF".) The analogy with Braille is tempting, but Braille has mappings to many other alphabets besides the commonly seen English/Latin mapping. There is Cyrillic Braille, Hebrew Braille, kana Braille, etc. More importantly, there is the concept of "Level 2 Braille" in which a single dot pattern or a combination of two or three is assigned a meaning that varies depending on context, and is not always mnemonically derived from the individual letters. Punched-tape codes and card codes don't have these characteristics. You can find more codes for punched cards and tape, as well as internal codes for early computers, at Dik Winter's site: http://homepages.cwi.nl/~dik/english/codes/ or at Roman Czyborra's site, rumored to be at http://czyborra.com but usually not available. BTW, speaking of Roman, thanks to everyone who responded to my inquiries about his whereabouts. Actually, I admit I was primarily interested in what had happened to his *site*, since it was (and still is) usually unavailable. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
