Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!pasteur!ames!ncar!ico!ism780c!haddock!suitti
From: suitti@haddock.ima.isc.com (Stephen Uitti)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Color sensitivity?  No, BUT....
Message-ID: <12845@haddock.ima.isc.com>
Date: 28 Apr 89 15:54:28 GMT
References: <12565@lanl.gov> <9968@claris.com> <1318@frog.UUCP> <1265@l.cc.purdue.edu>
Reply-To: suitti@haddock.ima.isc.com (Stephen Uitti)
Distribution: na
Organization: Interactive Systems, Boston
Lines: 25

In article <1265@l.cc.purdue.edu> cik@l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes:
>> And then again, having fonts be significant in variable names would make
>> it easy to have variables like "script-G" that pop up in Quantum Mechanics...
>> (No, I am NOT serious.  :-)
>
>Why not?  Mathematicians have been using fonts and foreign alphabets for
>hundreds of years without confusion.  Just because at some stage in the
>development of computers only punch card symbols were available, and at
>the present time there is this atrocious attempt to limit us to the 63
>characters which the 7-bit ASCII handles, we should give this up?  We know
>how to use escape characters for those channels which are so limited.

Mathematicians have not been doing this without confusion.  This
is a myth.  It is probably built on some sort of industry-wide
self-feeding ego trip.  APL required all sorts of odd looking
symbols.  It was a nightmare.  Write only programming.

Seven bit ASCII has more than 63 printable characters.  (2 ** 7)
= 128.  Seven bit ASCII is fine for programming (in english, as
used in the states).  If anything, it is too rich a character
set.  Fancy fonts and graphics should live in the documentation.

In any case, with any kind of luck, i won't have to debug your code.

Stephen.