Showing the usefulness of that, back around 1985 I was in a training session at Unisys and the instructor told us about his time as a programmer in Vietnam during wartime. He was part of a group that modified software for artillery fire control systems in the field, and each time one of the soldier programmers got orders to return home he would leave an easter egg in the code. A few days later a message might pop up saying, "Drinking a beer at home watching tv, wish you were here??" or little things along those lines. The instructor said one guy, however, went into the code and globally replaced variable names with combinations of 1, l, 0, O. Since the 1/l and 0/O were displayed identically, the programmers didn't find the prank funny. Our instructor said as he traveled the US training groups, he hoped he would find the guy. 10 or 15 years later he was still more than a tad angry. All for lack of slashes and serifs. Incidentally, living in Austria I was surprised to see ones commonly written looking nearly like upside down Vs. Mike Markowski On 4/13/20 8:38 AM, Clem Cole wrote:

On Mon, Apr 13, 2020 at 8:22 AM Thomas Paulsen <thomas.paulsen(a)firemail.de> wrote: There's many obfuscation tools for 'C' that existed back in the day which did the above automatically. I've had the displeasure to debug code run through that for which the original source has been lost... "Pleasure" ... right. I'll go with that since this is still polite company. Warner

On Mon, Apr 13, 2020 at 6:53 AM Paul Guertin <paul(a)guertin.net> wrote: Because it was always wrong by a strict interpretation of the hyphenation rules of English. In English, one can say "I have anal-retentive tendencies" (with a hyphen) but also "I am anal retentive" (without). Both of these phrases are correct because when two or more words are used to modify a noun that follows, they are hyphenated, otherwise they are not. So phrases like "the control-c character" or "the control-v sequence" are correct, but it should be "hit control c to abort" (without a hyphen) by this rule. However, that's not the full story. When you are telling a user to hit "control c" in a technical manual, when you hyphenate it carries a connotation to many readers (mostly non-technical ones) to press the control key, release it and then do the same with 'c', which as we all know won't work. "Conrol+c" however connotes to many doing both at the same time, so that convention was adopted to avoid the confusion about what '-' means and dodge the rather tricky hyphenation rules (which I've stated only in brief, btw). So this convention shifted as computers became more mainstream. Warner P.S. Yes, I know that firetruck used to be fire-truck and it was always hyphenated for a time, even when not used in a phrase like 'fire-truck company'. That's one of the exceptions, and Control-C also fell under that convention. But technical writers started to evolve it to '+' in maybe the 90s to help convey the notion of both at the same time.... and coincidentally to avoid silly arguments about convention vs "the rules" that made things more confusing, not less. P.P.S. I don't have a good source to this other than second-hand recollection of my wife who used to do technical writing in the 90s, and half-remembered usenet flame wars. The English rule, though, can be found in any style manual, and is direct from a former English professor (also my wife).

On Mon, Apr 13, 2020 at 11:29:07AM -0400, Arthur Krewat wrote: When I was a student, I once cheated during an exam (I know, I'm ashamed) by giving the answer to my neighbor and friend: I gave him the good answer, which was a "0" (zero). My friend got a bad grade, since he read "ø", the symbol for "empty set". Pierre

Dixit Nemo (2020-04-13 9:23 a.m.): I would love to see a study correlating the serif length on 1 with both the age of the writer and the place he or she learned to write. Most Europeans write ones with serifs, but while some of them write normal serifs, others go full CVS receipt and end up with serifs longer than the character they're seriffing. P.

On Tue, Apr 14, 2020 at 08:09:21AM +1000, Dave Horsfall wrote: I (raised in England), in my early 50s: draw a 1 as simply a vertical stroke, no serifs draw a 7 without any bar, but did see that being used by some while in middle school draw an 4 'open', rather than 'closed' draw 0 variably depending upon context A 0 usually without slash, occasionaly with a slash when writing code or it would otherwise be ambiguous (licence codes, etc). We tended to view the stroked 7 as a Continental practice, but some people adopted it. As to your question about spaces, I do it as Paul described - a short of shallow bucket. Aha - so you were pulling our legs with your phrasing of the subject. DF

Since it's COFF, I replaced to the list. On 4/13/2020 1:35 PM, Paul Guertin wrote: 20 years from now, no one will get the CVS reference without searching for it :) ak