Re: Subscript brackets

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

"Historically, I believe the uniform-reference argument was *part* of the
original reason for not using square brackets.  Another part was that
the early requirements documents for Ada stated that the character set
used had to be restricted, so that it could be used on things like
teletype machines."

Hello, I am an old teletype machine and mostly I sleep these days, but
one of my grandchildren (a superduper 300MHz workstation) woke me up
to show me the above quote. I wish you all to know that my share
of printing square brackes is behind me now, and my square bracket
keys, like all the other keys are a bit warn, but you could not possibly
mistake them even now for round parenes.

Now it is certainly true that that idiot across the street, the O29 
keypunch, has no square brackets, but you can't blame him too much,
he works for a company whose wondrous EBCDIC code either does not
include square bracket, or, depending on which page you read, puts
them in four different places in the code chart.