Re: [Groff] meaning of \[or] glyph

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Werner,

I wrote:
> > The problem is that \[or] might have been used for different
> > purposes, e.g. denoting divisibility of whole numbers.
> 
> But not bracket building?  I know it isn't used for that these days,
> but perhaps historically.

Actually, from my dodgy memory many keyboards didn't used to have an
ASCII 124 character.  Hence pipes were implemented in the shell with a
circumflex character.  And up until recently it still worked in addition
to the later vertical bar, e.g.

    grep foo ^ sed 's/:.*//' ^ sort ^ uniq -c ^ sort -n

Perhaps it was only printed in the special font because normal fonts of
the time didn't have it?  Hence \fI| wasn't itaic.

Cheers,


Ralph.