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Comment by behnamoh | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why people stopped adding symbols to ASCII. The number row on Macs is just these characters:

    ~!@#$%^&*()_+

And every programming language uses a subset of these. But why these symbols? Why didn't people add more symbols to the keyboard?

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ASCII is, as people have pointed out, a 7-bit code, so it can hold only 128 characters. When they added _ and ^ to it in 01967, they had to remove the ← and ↑ characters from ASCII-1963⁂. So there was no space for any of the characters —–“”×÷£°†‡¢§•€, which are absolutely critical even for English. "National variants" of ASCII might allocate space to some of them, or to other characters like ñ which are even more critical to the languages that use them.

If you're interested in how ASCII ended up that way, Tom Jennings wrote an excellent history: https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/CharCodeHist/index...

Of course, larger character sets that include ASCII as a subset do keep adding symbols: https://www.unicode.org/alloc/Pipeline.html and some programming languages do use non-ASCII symbols: https://docs.raku.org/language/operators

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⁂ Smalltalk's continued use of ASCII-1963, among other things so that it could use ← as the assignment operator, is the reason that OO programmers got in the habit of using CamelCase, and are still doing so today, despite using a character set containing the underscore, and, typically, programming languages in which underscores are valid characters

> —–“”×÷£°†‡¢§•€, which are absolutely critical even for English

Assuming that second dash is an en-dash, I've not used the majority of those characters even when handwriting. I would say the quotes I handwrite are closer to symmetrical " quotes, I do still use the multiply but I use a slash for divide, I do use the pound symbol and degree symbol, and I've never used the rest. And I'm from england

A lot of them are typographic in nature rather than manuscript.

I type as well, I still wouldn't call them "absolutely critical"

If you wouldn't call them “absolutely critical” I wouldn't call you a typographer.

ASCII is a 7-bit code, so there are only so many symbols one can add. Prior to ASCII, you had codes that used as few as 5 bits. Early C had the option to use digraphs to represent various forms of parenthesis, simply because symbols like {} and [] were not universal.

(Strictly speaking, people did continue adding symbols. We used to talk about code pages: when the MSB was 0, the other 7 bits were ASCII. When the MSB was 1, the other 7 bits were a user selected code pade.)

Many European layouts do have more symbols outside ASCII. For example German has ° (degree) and ß (ess-tset) and § (paragraph). German PC keyboards also tend to have µ on the M key, but it is available with the right Alt key.

Macintosh keyboard layouts tend to have many symbols on Option-combinations but they are not always printed.

ASCII is 7-bit and fully filled out. Every other extended character system prior to Unicode was sporadically supported. C has digraphs and trigraphs because even the ASCII punctuation wasn't guaranteed to be available on all keyboards. IBM, notably had an APL typeball for their Selectric derived terminals but that was equivalent to switching character sets and not something that could be considered universal prior to Unicode.

>And every programming language uses a subset of these.

You might like https://juliamono.netlify.app/#fnref:zscode

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