3 ms·
Disappointed this wasn't an article about the typographical history of the underscore.
by xg15 5y ago
Disappointed this wasn't an article about the typographical history of the underscore.
- o_m 5y agoMe too. Wikipedia has a pretty good article about it though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underscore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underscore
- gnat 5y agoRelevant part: As early output devices (Teleprinters, CRTs and line printers) could not produce more than one character at a location, it was not possible to underscore text, so early encodings such as ITA2 and the first versions of ASCII had no underscore. IBM's EBCDIC character-coding system, introduced in 1964, added the underscore, which IBM referred to as the "break character". ASCII added it in 1967.
- Koshkin 5y agoI hate having to use the underscore instead of the minus sign in code. (I believe I have seen languages that allow using the minus sign to separate words in an identifier, but that might have been in pseudocode.)
- klyrs 5y agoIt's common in lisp, where -,*,+,/ are names of functions.