Re: [COFF] Comparative promptology

Harald Arnesen <skogtun(a)gmail.com> writes: Not at the Norwegian Institute of Technology (now part of the Norwegian University of Technology and Science). There, it was called "nabla", because of the EXEC 8 operating system on UNIVAC mainframes, which used the FIELDATA character set, and where the "Master Space" character, (visually represented by nabla, which looks like an upside-down capital delta: '∇' if what you're reading this text on supports Unicode) was used as a prefix character indicating an operating system command. It was mapped to ASCII 64 externally, a natural choice, because FIELDATA had no @, ASCII had no nabla -- and Master Space was encoded as decimal 64 in FIELDATA already. The name stuck, and @ kept being called nabla at least until 1990. -tih -- Most people who graduate with CS degrees don't understand the significance of Lisp. Lisp is the most important idea in computer science. --Alan Kay