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I think the ISO/IEC 646 invariant character set is more the issue.



In the "Swedish 7-bit ASCII", the C code "a || b" would look like "a öö b". The same character mappings were used in Finland, and that's why IRC count the characters {|}[\] as letters (that would typically have been displayed as "äöåÄÖÅ").

On the Compis II computer (a CP/M machine built on the 80186 CPU), there were places for {|}[\] in the character set, but they were in the top half of the 8-bit characters and not generally useful for programming.




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