Re: My last post of the decade here

In article
<mike-C9383F.12010804012010@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Mike Ash <mike@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In article <7qcmvfF6gaU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
David Cowie <me@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Sun, 03 Jan 2010 17:45:16 -0500, aaron wrote:

So next topic the ambiguities between one and small letter 'l'.

Not forgetting "I"
I1l - which is which, if you're viewing this in a sans-serif font?

India, one, lima. My font, Monaco, is sans-serif, but specifically
dis-ambiguates these similar characters. (India is a plain straight
line, one has a little tick mark coming off the top, and lima has a
similar tick mark at the bottom. For O and 0, the zero has a slash
through it.)

From time to time, I come across a programmer working in a font which
doesn't make these distinctions at all. I always get a good laugh at
their expense.

That sends me back to the days of punch cards and paper output.
IIRC, it was 1974 and there was a discussion in the group on how to
create the most unreadable code (in FORTRAN by the way). My
suggestion was using variable names that used "I" and "1"
characters in various orders. In the typeface used by the printers
at that time, the only difference between them was that the "1"
didn't have the right side of the cap (the left side was
horizontal, not sloped like the "1" in other typefaces). I also
looked at combinations of "0" and "O" (there was no slash in the
printed output) but the character shapes were noticeably different.

--
Robert Woodward <robertaw@xxxxxxxxxxx>
<http://www.drizzle.com/~robertaw>
.

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