From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: cowan@mercury.ccil.org (John Cowan) Date: Sat, 9 Jul 2016 11:59:51 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Slashes In-Reply-To: <201607091322.u69DMtSu001030@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> References: <201607091322.u69DMtSu001030@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> Message-ID: <20160709155951.GB1076@mercury.ccil.org> Doug McIlroy scripsit: > This is sheer hypothesis, but I have always thought that \ got > onto printer chains and type balls as a crude drawing aid. Ditto > for |. Once the characters became available people began to find > uses for them. tells us that \ was introduced into ASCII by Bob Bemer in order to make \/ for 'or' and /\ for 'and' available, primarily for the use of Algol 60. It had not been available in any manufacturer's character set before ASCII-63, as far as is known. Unfortunately, none of the five existing Algol 60 implementations actually support these sequences. | was commonplace, however, as it has at least 15 mathematical uses: see . As far as I know, it has always been used as 'or' on computers. -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan at ccil.org If I have seen farther than others, it is because I am surrounded by dwarves. --Murray Gell-Mann