Talk:Atari ST character set

Code point 127...
Have we any kind of source for it being a "house" symbol? I always took it as being a greek uppercase delta, as it's a perfect triangle in all the basic ROM charactersets, and can actually be produced with a fairly simple keyboard combination (at least, in word processors like First Word; can't remember if the same combo worked under GEM itself for filenames/labels/etc... it involved, on the UK keyboard, the funky misplaced symbol key underneath "delete"). Not something you'd expect for such a niche technical glyph. It's much more common to use in maths and physics, for one thing, e.g. so you can signify delta-V over delta-T. I'm going to go and change it, but if anyone has a reliable source stating it's meant to be "house" (which could easily have been represented in true form in all three fonts), feel free to revert. 146.199.76.188 (talk) 13:28, 5 January 2019 (UTC)

(addendum: there are no other members of the "miscellaneous technical" unicode group represented in the characterset, although they probably weren't a recognised set before Unicode came along, somewhat after the death of Atari Computer Corp. House, and all the others, are fairly niche symbols and ones that I doubt would ever be used inline to a piece of text, more commonly as part of a graphical structure instead like a circuit diagram or CAD plan, and therefore would be something the ST could just draw with pixels if needed. Unicode only really includes them because its remit seems to be to encode every single unique symbol ever used by humankind in any context, whether or not they're actually of any use for the business of writing out text. Whereas Delta is a pretty commonly used thing in mathematical formulas and the like, and can be often seen being used inline in the text of school physics books and scientific papers, and so would be quite handy to have as an extended-ASCII-representable character. It would be by far the most important such symbol missing from the overall character set if it was omitted.) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 146.199.76.188 (talk) 13:37, 5 January 2019 (UTC)


 * edit - actually there is another slight overlap with that range: the top and bottom Integral symbols. Though those are oddities in themselves, in terms of Unicode overall, as they should by rights appear in the Mathematical Operators block and seem to have been "forgotten about" at first, possibly because they already commonly appeared in Extended ASCII and no-one thought it necessary to duplicate those symbols at first, until the math ops block ran out of space? (There are plenty of *complete*, single-space-high integral signs and variations upon them, there...) ... These two/three are the only examples, though, there's nothing else commonly used either by Atari or CP437 in Misc Tech. 146.199.76.188 (talk) 14:21, 5 January 2019 (UTC)

((further addendum: The IBM 437 codepage seems somewhat agnostic as to what this character code is meant to be - officially it seems to be defined as "house", for reasons best known to IBM (maybe for use in textmode games/educational software or something, along with the faces, musical notes etc?), but that it can also be used to represent Delta (and that CP's wiki page says it was generally used as such). For that reason their default ROM charset in mainline adaptors, and that of many cloners, shows a quite squat house which could be read as either symbol depending on context and how hard you squinted. Some of IBM's more niche products, and the BIOSes of later cloners, appear to more definitely choose one or the other. There are a few that draw a taller, decidedly pentagonal glyph that more closely matches the "actual" house symbol, but also quite a few, including the IBM PC Convertible and BIOSes from e.g. ATI, that make it either almost, or indeed wholly triangular, some even applying a bit of a calligraphic shading effect (one "leg" thicker than the other") to emphasise it as a Delta. This appears to be the route that Atari chose, presumably because they were defining a ROM charset mainly for use in the GUI, to reduce the data load in programs that focussed on text and to establish a common codepage for documents displayable from the desktop, instead of it being the machine's primary method of image generation - the ST doesn't have any character-block / text-only modes, and is at heart a wholly graphical machine, so any more niche symbols it lacks can still be drawn pixel-by-pixel within the appropriate program. So, there's no need for the faces, notes, box drawing or shading (etc) characters that it also does away with compared to CP437, and so probably no need for a "house", thus that codepoint can be dedicated to the more common, logical and widely useful half of the shared symbol...))146.199.76.188 (talk) 14:10, 5 January 2019 (UTC)