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From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Unicode in strings
Date: Thu, 30 May 2024 02:50:33 -0000 (UTC)
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On Wed, 29 May 2024 08:07:50 GMT, Anton Ertl wrote:

> Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:
>
>>On Mon, 20 May 2024 11:46:20 GMT, Anton Ertl wrote:
>>
>>> Algol 60 does not standardize a program representation in characters
>>> (a grave mistake fixed by most later programming languages ...
>>
>>That would likely not have been considered feasible in 1960, given the
>>wide variation in character sets between computer systems.
> 
> COBOL did it.  LISP did it.

And so did Fortran. They all did it by severely curtailing their allowed 
character sets.

> It's just that the Algol 60 committee did not want to go there.

They wanted symbols like “÷”, “×”, “↑”, “≤”, “≥”, “≠”, “≡”, “⊃”, “∨”, “∧”, 
“¬” ... you get the idea. I don’t any computer system on earth could 
provide all those symbols at the time, or even, say, 20 years later.