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Four Column ASCII (2017)

https://garbagecollected.org/2017/01/31/four-column-ascii/
54•tempodox•1d ago

Comments

rbanffy•1d ago
This is also why the Teletype layout has parentheses on 8 and 9 unlike modem keyboards that have them on 9 and 0 (a layout popularised by the IBM Selectric). The original Apple IIs had this same layout, with a “bell” on top of the G.
Terretta•1d ago
What happened to this block and the keyboard key arrangement?

  ESC  [  {  11011
  FS   \  |  11100
  GS   ]  }  11101
Also curious why the keys open and close braces, but ... the single and double curly quotes don't open and close, but are stacked. Seems nuts every time I type Option-{ and Option-Shift-{ …
kazinator•38m ago
You're no longer talking about ASCII. ASCII has only a double quote, apostrophe (which doubles as a single quote) and backtick/backquote.

Note on your Mac that the Option-{ and Option-}, with and without Shift, produce quotes which are all distinct from the characters produced by your '/" key! They are Unicode characters not in ASCII.

In the ASCII standard (1977 version here: https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/FIPS/fipspub1-2-197...) the example table shows a glyph for the double quote which is vertical: it is neither an opening nor closing quote.

The apostrophe is shown as a closing quote, by slanting to the right; approximately a mirror image of the backtick. So it looks as though those two are intended to form an opening and closing pair. Except, in many terminal fonts, the apostrophe is a just vertical tick, like half of a double quote.

The ' being veritcal helps programming language '...' literals not look weird.

dang•56m ago
Related. Others?

Four Column ASCII (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21073463 - Sept 2019 (40 comments)

Four Column ASCII - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13539552 - Feb 2017 (68 comments)

kazinator•53m ago
This is by design, so that case conversion and folding is just a bit operation.

The idea that SOH/1 is "Ctrl-A" or ESC/27 is "Ctrl-[" is not part of ASCII; that idea comes from they way terminals provided access to the control characters, by a Ctrl key that just masked out a few bits.

dveeden2•50m ago
Also easy to see why Ctrl-D works for exiting sessions.
timonoko•45m ago
where does this character set come from? It looks different on xterm.

for x in range(0x0,0x20): print(chr(x),end=" ")

                    

voxelghost•15m ago
What are you trying to achieve, none of those characters are printable, and definetly not going to show up on the web.

    for x in range(0x0,0x20): print(f'({chr(x)})', end =' ')
    (0|) (1|) (2|) (3|) (4|) (5|) (6|) (7|) (8) (9| ) (10|
    ) (11|
          ) (12|
    ) (14|) (15|) (16|) (17|) (18|) (19|) (20|) (21|) (22|) (23|) (24|) (25|)    (26|␦) (27|8|) (29|) (30|) (31|)
fix4fun•39m ago
For me was interesting that all digits in ASCII starts with 0x3, eg. 0x30 - 0, 0x31 - 1, ..., 0x39 - 9. I thought it was accidental, but in real it was intended. This was giving possibility to build simple counting/accounting machines with minimal circuit logic with BCD (Binary Coded Decimals). That was wow for me ;)
taejavu•22m ago
For whatever reason, there are extraordinarily few references that I come back to over and over, across the years and decades. This is one of them.
taejavu•20m ago
Tangentially related, there is much insight about Unix idioms to be gained from understanding the key layout of the terminal Bill Joy used to create vi

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21586980

Four Column ASCII (2017)

https://garbagecollected.org/2017/01/31/four-column-ascii/
57•tempodox•1d ago•11 comments

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