From: Arcane Jill (arcanejill@ramonsky.com)
Date: Thu Dec 18 2003 - 11:36:27 EST
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Eric Scace [mailto:eric@scace.org]
> Sent: Thursday, December 18, 2003 3:57 PM
> To: John Cowan; Arcane Jill
> Cc: unicode@unicode.org
> 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
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