From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Thu Dec 20 2007 - 13:41:00 CST
On 12/20/2007 10:10 AM, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
> Karl Pentzlin wrote:
>
>
>> What is the use of the BROKEN BAR, especially contrastive to the
>> VERTICAL LINE?
>>
>
> During some period of time (it may have been in the 1970s or even the
> 1960s), the vertical line was displayed as broken in some devices. I
> don't think there's any good reason why this variant was later regarded
> as a separate character, with a code of its own. I don't think I've ever
> seen the broken bar in the wild, in actual use, as a separate character,
> though I have used devices (both display and hardcopy) where the
> vertical line has a broken shape.
>
A broken bar is not an acceptable substitution for a solid bar in most
circumstances. It's like
the different length dashes. Once you demand a certain fidelity of your
representation so you
can use if for notational purposes (without hacks like \/ or `this'),
variations that might at one
point have been mere matters of appearance, now become significant, and
require dedicated
character codes.
That said, I'd rather defer to sources that know the particular history,
than speculate whether
or not a differentiation in significance was attached to this from the
beginning. (Andreas provided
a pointer to a printed reference.)
> It is a mystery to me why the broken bar is included in some keyboards
> along with the vertical line. The only use I can imagine for it is in
> text graphics (conventionally called "ASCII art").
>
The question at hand would be whether it makes sense to support it in a
universal "rich"
keyboard (universal here in the sense of universally available, not
universal in scope).
A./
> (Sorry for sending my previous message, on U+00AC NOT SIGN, under this
> same heading. My e-mail program just got mad. Well, to be honest, I
> goofed up.)
>
> Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
> http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
>
>
>
>
>
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