On Monday, 13 April 2020 at 19:01:13 +1000, Dave Horsfall wrote: > In the time-mean I also saw a slash through "Z" (Zulu, Zed, Zee) in order > to distinguish it from a "2" (FIGURES TWO); WTF? And you *never* slashed > your ones, lest thou ended up with the contents of an 029 chad-box over > thine head... > > These days, I merely slash my sevens by habit and it doesn't even raise an > eyebrow; even Oz Pigeon Post's mail mangler seems to accept it[*]. > > What're other bods' experiences? It's funny that nobody seems to have differentiated these usages. I've seen at least three: 1. "European" characters: 1 with a serif (is that really the correct term?), 7 with a stroke, Z also with a stroke. Also small u with a stroke above it in German, left over from the days („Sütterlinschrift“) when this was the only distinction between written u and n. None of these had anything to do with computers. 2. The distinction between O and 0. Put a cross through the 0 and leave the O as it was. In my experience, this too predated computers: I first learnt it round 1963 when trying to become a radio amateur, much to the disgust of my maths teacher, who also didn't like the hooked 1s and the crossed 7s. 3. The distinction between O and 0. The same as before, almost: put a cross through the O and leave the 0 normal. This must be a US usage, since O and Ø are both valid (and different) letters in some Nordic languages. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog at lemis.com for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 163 bytes Desc: not available URL: