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[REBOL] Rebol Tech, please answer. Two questions. Re:(6)

From: holger:rebol at: 12-Sep-2000 9:01

On Tue, Sep 12, 2000 at 07:27:07AM -0700, [jeff--rebol--net] wrote:
> > Semicolon was not picked because it's the LISP comment > character, the square brackets are not in REBOL because > they're found in FORTH, the reason for their use is based on > their position on the keyboard (home row) and the fact that > they are UNSHIFTED!! People will be typing these things ALOT > so they'd better be conveniently located and easy to hit. > > REBOL doesn't want your fingers to hurt.
The fingers of Americans anyway. German fingers are supposed to hurt, I guess :-). On a German keyboard the ";" is shifted. It is on top of the "," key. The < /">" are on a separate key. It is even worse for "["/"]", because a German keyboard does not have these characters directly accessible at all. It has A-umlaut and U-umlaut in those places (corresponding to the ASCII character positions of "["/"]", which in the now-obsolete German 7-bit ISO encoding had been replaced with those umlauts). Most keyboards let you enter "["/"]" as Alt-A-Umlaut and Alt-U-Umlaut, but, of course, pressing the Alt key is even more awkard than pressing the Shift key. There are even some older computer systems which don't have "["/"]" in their German versions at all (e.g. German localized versions of 8-bit systems like Commodore-64) or which don't usually provide keyboards that have "["/"]" keys on them (e.g. Wang VS).
> Everyone essentially got the answer right-- A+! :-)
Or "1+" in German grades. Of course everyone's grade for "international awareness" would be a little lower :-). -- Holger Kruse [holger--rebol--com]