From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: grog@lemis.com (Greg Lehey) Date: Sun, 26 Jan 2003 09:40:03 +0800 Subject: [TUHS] The ^ = | ? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20030126014003.GA3818@sydney.worldwide.lemis.com> On Thursday, 23 January 2003 at 22:09:51 -0500, Norman Wilson wrote: > > By the Fourth Edition (November 1973) there had evidently been more > time to think about the syntax; the modern notation is shown, except > that ^ is allowed as a synonym for |. I have long guessed that was > because in those dark days of the past, some upper-case-only > terminals (remember stty lcase?) offered no way to type | (and > perhaps likewise {}`~) but I don't really know. Certainly the [AK]SR-33 didn't have {}~. I had this funny feeling that they did have |, but it doesn't make sense, and I'm probably wrong. A thing to recall is that the shape of some of the symbols was somewhat different in those days. In particular, _ was a backarrow (pointing left), and ^ was an uparrow, making it look much more like | than it appears nowadays. Greg -- Finger grog at lemis.com for PGP public key See complete headers for address and phone numbers