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From: rbowman <bowman@montana.com>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: The joy of FORTRAN-like languages
Date: 29 Sep 2024 19:29:55 GMT
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On Sun, 29 Sep 2024 07:16:43 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> On 29/09/2024 04:15, rbowman wrote:
>> On Sat, 28 Sep 2024 15:17:12 -0700, Lars Poulsen wrote:
>> 
>>> I was late to discovering C. In the 1970's I lived in Denmark, and our
>>> terminals, printers, keyboards etc were using a national version of
>>> the ISO standard interchange code that Americans kn ow as ASCII.
>>> Since Danish have three unique (well sort-of shared with Swedish and
>>> Norvegian) vowels at the end of the alphabet (æ ø å / Æ Ø Å), these
>>> were allocated at the end of the alphabet - after z / Z. When you look
>>> at the ASCII character table, you will see that each of these
>>> conflicts with significant symbols of the C language ({ \ } / [ | ]).
>>> This created a strong disincentive to experiment with a "fringe"
>>> programming language.
>> 
>> Don't feel bad. I always forget what the Apple II lacked, maybe the
>> tilde,
>> but even with a Z-80 SoftCard you had to do some tweaks to write C
>> code.
> 
> Curly braces. I had a friend who said 'you cant program in C on an Apple
> because there are no curly braces'.
> 
> I think I sent him a header file with
> 
> #define BEGIN {
> #define END }

Thanks. That make more sense that a missing tilde. It's a useful operator 
but not something you use every day. 
> 
> In it.