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darobin (1316)

darobin
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http://berjon.com/

Journal of darobin (1316)

Wednesday April 09, 2003
09:03 AM

Keyboards and language design

[ #11546 ]

Given a French keyboard where ~#{}[]|`@ are all accessible only through Alt-Gr would you have designed Perl the same way or would you have gone more in the direction of Python or Ruby? All those sigils do tend to be extremely ASCII-keyboard centric.


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  • Last time I used a french keyboard, it took me 5 goes to write qwerty, and that was with staring at the keyboard. :-)

    In answer to the question, I'd say that the answer is probably that they would have been different. Think back to early unix commands being very short due to input device limitations (teletypes were too slow for long commands).

    -Dom

  • So all those characters are missing, but $ is there? Odd. Sounds like American imperialism to me.

    --
    J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
  • What, you do your own typing?!?
  • I'm pretty sure Larry has gone on record as
    still thinking sigils are a good idea, and I
    agree. There's nothing preventing a frenchman
    or Russian from using an American keyboard
    layout, or any other there heart desires;
    particularly if they are running something
    like Linux. And braces are hardly Perl-specific.
    --
    Were that I say, pancakes?
  • C, shell, sed, awk etc would have been designet otherwise as well!

    Once when I had to do a long stint of Pascal programming (ah the olden days) I found a North American keyboard and used that.
    That also made me realise why on earth the slash (/) is used as a regexp separator - it sit nicely in the lower right hand side of the keyboard - just where dash is on my danish keyboard, instead of as shift-7.

    I had to give up after a while, as it was just too difficult to write normal danish in comments, letters, not

    • C, shell, sed, awk etc would have been designet otherwise as well!

      Yes! But Python and Ruby would remain the same...

      I can live with stuff being on Shift. What pains me is Alt-Gr (dunno if you have it, it's for a third item on the same key and sits immediately right of the space bra [typo intentionally not corrected] instead of the right Alt key). You mention "/", but on French keyboards "\" is much worse being Alt-Gr-8 (done with a single hand, thumb on Alt-Gr, middle finger on 8 -- it's quick

      --

      -- Robin Berjon [berjon.com]

      • I'm afriad I have to contest the bit about the UK keyboard being better the the US keyboard.

        They swap @ and " ... for no apparent reason. If anything Perl has made me more sensitive to the similarity and differences in the usage of '/" and happy that on the keyboards I use most often (imported with from the states because I'm cheap like that) they're actually on the same key.

        I can understand # being their funnly little L thing that they use for their currency, it might be useful occasionally (and if Larry

        • Nah, the US keyboard is the one swapping the @ and ", you got it the wrong way 'round.

          I'm not sure about using £ or ￡ for scalars, I think that in the interest of I18N the best would have been the universal currency symbol, ¤.

          --

          -- Robin Berjon [berjon.com]

  • It probably would have been different if it were designed on a French keyboard. So I am thankful it wasn't.

  • Although it wasnt as bad, I learnt Perl when I was using a German (European) keyboard layout.. took me ages to "relearn" how to type Perl when I started using a US keyboard layout again, especially since I'm not a true touch typer, but simply 'remember' the key positions

    What's worse, I got used to playing Starcraft in German (with hotkeys) and the English hotkeys are COMPLETELY different :)

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