Re: fortran character set

I'm English, live in Australia and worked for foreign companies in
South America and Europe most of my life (and one time in New York); I
specialise in something that requires language processing and as ex-
Editor of Physics Abstracts, had to have a working knowledge of very
many languages (not fluent mind you - just to know what something was
about).

The "hash" sign meant "number" in England in days of ticker-tape and
baudot, well before appearing on push button telephones as a
"different" visual symbol from "*" since one more key was spare to
fill the digit rectangle of 4 by 3. (I worked for the UK Post Office
research laboratories too).

"#" is known a "la vieja" (the old lady) in Spanish, which name is
given to their version of the children's game of "nought-and-crosses".
You can see why!

But Americans seem to have needed to talk about Pounds in the 40's and
'50s, (since 1 Pound used to equal five US dollars) and latched onto
this strange "number" sign that looked a bit like the Pound smbol that
they couldn't find on their keyboards (well, input devices known as
teletype machines).

Today and locally, you COULD have a single "our currency" key, used by
everybody world-wide, which would be defined, again locally, as a
particular different display symbol and with particular currency
amount editing rules. The problem is, what do you do when you need to
talk about (in text) other people's currency symbols?....


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