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Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watnot!watmath!clyde!ima!trb
From: trb@ima.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d,misc.misc
Subject: Re: Literacy was: smail pronounciation
Message-ID: <505@ima.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 9-Mar-87 12:11:23 EST
Article-I.D.: ima.505
Posted: Mon Mar  9 12:11:23 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 10-Mar-87 04:26:46 EST
References: <667@rtech.UUCP> <1074@ulowell.cs.ulowell.edu> <486@sw1e.UUCP> <517@cod.UUCP> <1528@whuts.UUCP> <2649@eagle.ukc.ac.uk>
Reply-To: trb@ima.UUCP (Andrew Tannenbaum)
Organization: Interactive Systems, Boston, MA
Lines: 17
Xref: utgpu comp.sources.d:434 misc.misc:673

When the rn follow-upper asked me if I was absolutely sure I wanted to
do this, I was hoping that there was a response other than yes or no...

In article <2649@eagle.ukc.ac.uk> rjf@ukc.ukc.ac.uk (R.J.Faichney) writes:
> Does ^ look like a circumflex to you? It's an up-arrow to me.

For the sake of historical perspective, the 128 character ASCII
character set that we use and love had a couple of changes made to it
at some point (early '70's?).  The characters ^ and _, which are
currently caret and underline respectively, used to be up-arrow and
back-arrow.  The up-arrow looked like what you'd get if you
superimposed | and ^ (assuming that | is an unbroken vertical bar).
The back-arrow was a left pointing arrow, like < and - superimposed, I
guess.  Printers that printed back-arrows would ruin underlined text in
listings.

	Andrew Tannenbaum   Interactive   Boston, MA   +1 617 247 1155