micky writes:

On Mon, 01 Jun 2015 11:08:37 -0500, Mark Lloyd wrote:

On 06/01/2015 08:19 AM, Stormin Mormon wrote:

[snip]

Nor do they know the difference between a letter
o and a number zero.

I had an electronics college course in 1980. We were using the debugger
program that comes with CP/M (called DDT). There was a 'g' command to
run a program. 'g' was followed by an address (g100 was common). There
was no specific command to exit the program, instead you would go to
address zero. That is, 'g0'. Several students would complain about that
not working. They were entering 'go' instead of 'g0'.

I have zero in one of my phone numbers. Every
time someone uses letter o when they read
it back, I correct them. Zero, not oh. Few
actually understand.


I try to avoid saying 'o' (the letter) in phone "numbers". For example,
the area code 903 (nine-zero-three, NOT nine-owe-three).

Not me. My phone number ends in 20 and I always say two oh.

But what gets me is that in the US in the science field, people slash
their zeroes, but iiuc in Europe they slash their o's. What kind of a
stupid system are those? Wh'at's the point of having a system if the
two parts contradict each other?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashed_zero seems to contradict me. It
says " Slashed 'O' IBM (and a few other early mainframe makers)
used a convention in which the letter O has a slash and the digit 0 does
not. This is even more problematic for Danes, Faroese, and Norwegians
because it means two of their letters€”the O and slashed O (Ø)€”are
visually similar."

Am I wrong? It was never Europe, just IBM? And how can IBM and a few
other early mainframe makers be so stupid as to do things backwards?

I was there. In the 1960s we all programmed by filling out
"coding sheets". You slashed zeros or ohs. You had to or you would
not get what you wanted.
I learned Ohs.
Other places slashed zeros. It wasn't IBM making the rules.

There should have been follow through, the printers should have
been modified to match what was coded. Too late now, but
we still struggle with it in the computer field and even in RL.

--
Dan Espen