&& - and

**Daved** · 01-12-2008

Apparently not in Iceland or Romania at the very least:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout

**Elysia** · 01-12-2008

More world madness it seems. Do we need a standard for keyboard layout as well?

**anon** · 01-12-2008

If you have a load of special characters in your language, you'd need a larger keyboard to make room for ^. As far as I can see on my keyboard, only (most of) the actual character keys have only two functions, the special symbols already mostly have 3 meanings.

Well, I personally could switch to English layout too, but at first I'd have great trouble finding and memorizing the keys.

**Elysia** · 01-12-2008

But there are special keys that allows you to access special characters, typically Alt, Ctrl or Shift. I don't remember which ones are present on an english keyboard, however. More such could be added to get access to these keys. There has to be a standard layout - everyone is assuming you're always using english keyboard layout (well, most) and it causes lots of problem for shortcuts.

**anon** · 01-12-2008

You have apparently no idea that many alphabets have more characters than the 26 characters in English alphabet. These take up some of the keys where common punctuation is in English lay-out, meaning that more special symbols need to be pushed under Shift, Alt, Ctrl + Alt combinations.

The total number of symbols would be such that you simply couldn't display them all on the keys.

Even if you want standardization only for European languages, you'd still have to accept that lots and lots of character that you'll never use will appear on your keyboard.

So, for non-English it might be better to have a native keyboard to work in their native language, and switch to English lay-out for specific tasks (such as programming) if that is necessary and available.

**Elysia** · 01-12-2008

I know that...
But ideally, what I would like to see, is that all keyboards include the same special characters.
This would essentially help when everyone expects you to be using an english keyboard layout.
I don't know if you've felt it, but it's infuriating when they use a shortcut combination of characters that don't exist freely on your native keyboard!

Anyway, I digress. It's a difficult thing.

**anon** · 01-12-2008

But then who would decide which special characters are vital. Nowadays almost everbody uses @, but 99.9% of people here probably don't ever need ^ (it is not used as a math symbol in my country).

**Elysia** · 01-12-2008

I guess that's why they removed it.
But about the actual issue... well, I don't know. Perhaps try to model it after the english standard?

**King Mir** · 01-12-2008

Originally Posted by anon

I haven't actually seen anyone use those keywords.

My keyboard lay-out, for example, doesn't have a key for ^. Fortunately I need it seldom, but when I do, I rather type Alt + 094 than use bit_xor. With Code::Blocks even the Alt combination doesn't seem to work (?), so I resort to using the clipboard.

If someone were programming on a keyboard that doesn't have any of these symbols, I'd understand the usage of synonyms.

The symbol is actually just xor, since there is no logical xor operator.

**vart** · 01-13-2008

Originally Posted by Elysia

Perhaps try to model it after the english standard?

You joking, right?
Computer keyboards are modeled to be compatible with the typewriters, because a lot of computer users were comming to use computers as a replacements for that.

so local keyboard of the typewriter IS de facto a standard for the computer keyboard. Modifications could be freely done only to buttons that are outside the standard typewriter keyboard. Or to such combinations like Alt+ Ctrl+ that are not present on the typewriter
(Shift+ combinations are also fixed)

**Elysia** · 01-13-2008

Originally Posted by vart

You joking, right?

I didn't know (and I still don't), so I took a stab in the wild

**brewbuck** · 01-13-2008

Originally Posted by Elysia

I agree, there is no gain whatsoever to this and coders may be confused because there is no keyword AND.

More cluelessness from Elysia. The following is perfectly valid C++:

Code:

bool a, b, c, d, e;

a = b and c xor d and not e;

**Elysia** · 01-13-2008

Since when did I say it's not valid?

**brewbuck** · 01-13-2008

Originally Posted by Elysia

Since when did I not say it's valid?

When you said there is no keyword "AND."

**laserlight** · 01-13-2008

More cluelessness from Elysia. The following is perfectly valid C++:

On a technicality, Elysia stated that "there is no keyword AND", not "there is no keyword and", and your variables were not initialised, thus making a poor example anyway