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asciiextended-ascii

Why are '[' and ']' ascii codes not following each other?

Does anyone know why the design decision of having '[' and ']' or '{' and '}' ASCII key codes being two apart instead of one digit was made? OCD triggered.

Solution

  • Evolution of Character Codes

    Have a look @ the following article: https://web.archive.org/web/20050305043226/http://www.transbay.net/~enf/ascii/ascii.pdf

    I found it from the following stackexchange article: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/149901/94281

    Ascii was an evolutionary result but was based on previous work/inventions such as telegrams and morse code.

    Additionally, there were many different versions and proposals before we reached a final order and result.

    It seems that in some of the initial proposals [ and ] had been placed together.

    For example:

    enter image description here

    However, after the X3.2 meeting, the \ was added in between:

    enter image description here

    This is again visible in a publication from 1962:

    enter image description here

    Source: Source documents on the history of character codes, 1962-06

    Substitution Characters

    Reading the archive from Source Documents on the history of character Codes page 38 shows that some of the characters were grouped together and were planned to be substituted with other characters in 26 character languages:

    enter image description here

    A similar note is made about the characters '< = >' in relation to substituting them for more business-friendly characters.

    enter image description here

    References:

    Note: Researching this further to see why the X3.2 meeting resulted in this change.