From: already5chosen@yahoo.com

On Tue, 2 Dec 2025 13:53:48 +0100
Janis Papanagnou  wrote:

> On 2025-12-02 08:31:53, David Brown wrote:
> > On 01/12/2025 23:59, Janis Papanagnou wrote:  
> >> On 2025-12-01 21:06:13, Keith Thompson wrote:  
> >>>
> >>> The use of curly braces vs. begin/end is IMHO trivial.  [...]
> >>>
> >>> Someone who dislikes C for whatever reasons will probably dislike
> >>> most other languages that use curly braces, and not necessarily
> >>> because of that one syntactic detail.  
> >>
> >> There may also be just simple practical real-life facts that
> >> influence the preferences of languages with curly braces (or
> >> brackets). I want to remind that keyboards from other domains
> >> may not have the simple access to the [ ] { } characters! On
> >> my US keyboard [ and ] are adjacent and directly accessible,
> >> and { and } are on the same keys reachable simply with 'Shift'.
> >> That's extremely convenient if you're programming C-like syntax!
> >> Though on my German keyboard these characters are placed on the
> >> top numbers row in one line, ordered as { [ ] }, and reachable
> >> only through the 'Alt Gr' key. This is really a pain to type.
> >> For _very common characters_ in a fairly common and rich family
> >> of programming languages it's an issue [in such non-US domains].
> >>  
> > 
> > My Norwegian keyboard needs AltGr for {[]}, but I don't find it a
> > burden 
> > - it's habit, I suppose.  
> 
> Well, given that I'm using these keyboards since decades I'm
> (sort of) "used" to that layout. Nonetheless its "complexity"
> I'm feeling as burden; these _standard characters_ are far off
> (upper row), non adjacent (with room for typos), and the key
> to access them is available just on the right side (as opposed
> to the Shift or Ctrl keys, or the useless "Window" key). It's
> also practically a burden; my fingers get [literally] twisted
> when typing, and the physis of the fingers is strained; at the
> moment I'm suffering from aching sinews. The "typing ergonomy"
> is extremely reduced when using these characters. For me that
> really is (and ever was) a concrete burden, not only a little
> nuisance.
> 
> > 
> > But in days gone by if anyone ever needed to use trigraphs for C 
> > programming, then I am sure they would happily switch to a
> > word-based language given half a chance.  I find "{ }" nicer than
> > "begin end", but I'd pick "begin end" over "??< ??>" any day!  
> 
> I've never even had considered using trigraphs.
> 
> Janis
> 

I never used Western European keyboard, so probably don't understand
something very basic.
Suppose, you use Greek/Latin keyboard (or InScript/Latin, or
Cyrillic/Latin, or Hebrew/Latin, Arabic/Latin, Thai/Latin,
Vietnamese//Latin, etc ...). When you right code, you just switch the
keyboard layout from Greek to English (US) or English (UK). It's easy.
Tens of millions of programmers do it all the time, instinctively.
Why Western Europeans can't do exactly the same? Just because their
native scripts are also Latin-based? To me it does not sound as a
meaningful reason :(

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