Comment by rbanffy

12 days ago

This is also why the Teletype layout has parentheses on 8 and 9 unlike modem keyboards that have them on 9 and 0 (a layout popularised by the IBM Selectric). The original Apple IIs had this same layout, with a “bell” on top of the G.

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rbanffy

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Terretta  11 days ago

What happened to this block and the keyboard key arrangement?

  ESC  [  {  11011
  FS   \  |  11100
  GS   ]  }  11101

Also curious why the keys open and close braces, but ... the single and double curly quotes don't open and close, but are stacked. Seems nuts every time I type Option-{ and Option-Shift-{ …

  • kazinator  10 days ago

    You're no longer talking about ASCII. ASCII has only a double quote, apostrophe (which doubles as a single quote) and backtick/backquote.

    Note on your Mac that the Option-{ and Option-}, with and without Shift, produce quotes which are all distinct from the characters produced by your '/" key! They are Unicode characters not in ASCII.

    In the ASCII standard (1977 version here: https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/FIPS/fipspub1-2-197...) the example table shows a glyph for the double quote which is vertical: it is neither an opening nor closing quote.

    The apostrophe is shown as a closing quote, by slanting to the right; approximately a mirror image of the backtick. So it looks as though those two are intended to form an opening and closing pair. Except, in many terminal fonts, the apostrophe is a just vertical tick, like half of a double quote.

    The ' being veritcal helps programming language '...' literals not look weird.

  • jolmg  10 days ago

    > What happened to this block and the keyboard key arrangement?

    There's also these:

      | ASCII      | US keyboard |
  |------------+-------------|
  | 041/0x21 ! | 1 !         |
  | 042/0x22 " | 2 @         |
  | 043/0x23 # | 3 #         |
  | 044/0x24 $ | 4 $         |
  | 045/0x25 % | 5 %         |
  |            | 6 ^         |
  | 046/0x26 & | 7 &         |