[COFF] On having a slash

[gdmr at inf.ed.ac.uk (George Ross)]

> > the age of the writer and the place he or she learned to write. Most
> > Europeans write ones with serifs, but while some of them write normal
> > serifs, others go full CVS receipt and end up with serifs longer than
> > the character they're seriffing.
> 
> I (raised in England), in my early 50s:
>   draw a 1 as simply a vertical stroke, no serifs
>   draw a 7 without any bar, but did see that being used by some while in
> middle school

I (a Scot) draw a 1 with a serif and a 7 with a bar (and a Z with a bar)
because it was necessary for university maths not to mix up |, 1, 7, 2 and
Z, and the habit has just stuck.  Mathematicians, of course, have lots of 
other ways to decorate their fonts.

And I write zero with a slash and O without when clarity requires it (e.g. 
copying down serial numbers) and sometimes at other "computing" times too, 
though not consistently, because it helped the card-punch-operator.

I did have a summer job as a student at a place which did the 0 and O 
the other way round, which caused a bit of confusion at first.  I don't 
know why, because it wasn't the kind of place which would have been 
contrary about something like that.  Given that I got the job because the 
person I was working for didn't understand IMPLICIT INTEGER and couldn't 
see why his FORTRAN wasn't giving him the results he expected, my guess is 
that it was just a case of someone hearing about a good idea and just 
implementing it in their own way.
-- 
George D M Ross MSc PhD CEng MBCS CITP
University of Edinburgh, School of Informatics,
Appleton Tower, 11 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, Scotland, EH8 9LE
Mail: gdmr at inf.ed.ac.uk   Voice: 0131 650 5147 
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