Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!umd5!brl-adm!adm!dsill@NSWC-OAS.arpa
From: dsill@NSWC-OAS.arpa (Dave Sill)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: The D Programming Language
Message-ID: <12059@brl-adm.ARPA>
Date: 1 Mar 88 20:03:10 GMT
Sender: news@brl-adm.ARPA
Lines: 38

(Not really a C issue)

Am I the only person in the world that thinks it's time to scrap
ASCII?

Look at the contortions we have to go through in C because there
aren't really enough characters for the operators needed.  Look at the
messes we get into under the UNIX shells with quote characters,
delimiters, et cetera.  Wouldn't it be simpler if punctuation was
punctuation and metacharacters were metacharacters and there was no
overlap between the two?

APL, of course, solved this problem by inventing its own character
set.  Unfortunately, it was nonstandard and there was almost no
equipment that used that character set.

The time is ripe for a more flexible "Code for Information
Interchange".  How many more years/decades will we be forced to make
do with a lousy 95 symbols: all predefined, most vastly overloaded?

C would have been much more usable language if it hadn't had to have
been mapped to ASCII.  D could be the best of C and APL if a larger
character set was available.

I know, I know, the cost of such a change would be phenomonal.  Even
deciding on a new standard will be hard/expensive/time-consuming, but
it's *got* to be done sooner or later.  (Not until we've lived with
several incompatible proprietary systems for a while, though.)

I just needed to get that off my chest, sorry if I bothered you.

=========
The opinions expressed above are mine.

"There is very little importance in instruction sets."
					-- Ted Nelson

"There is very much importance in character sets."
					-- Me