On: Why do programming languages use curly braces?

[ygra]

The APL [1] designers heard you and created a language impossible to type on almost every keyboard layout [2] ;-)

As for me, I've been using US International for a few years by now (because I use too many curly-braces languages and didn't want to give up being able to type ümläüts). But frankly, changing the keyboard layout just for a programming language is a bit evil. In that sense I liked BASIC and Pascal; I don't mind keywords instead of symbols that much either and I tend to be faster typing words anyway.

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[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language)

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:APL-keybd2.svg

[itcmcgrath → ygra]

This made me search to see if there was any 256 key keyboards so I could have a key for every byte, but I apparently no one has been that crazy yet.

[ygra → itcmcgrath]

I like many parts of Unicode ∖ Latin-1. 256 keys might not be enough ;-)

[TheCoelacanth → ygra]

You'll just have to learn to do one of the encodings in your head.