From: david.brown@hesbynett.no   
      
   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.   
      
   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!   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)