The Question of Braces in APLASCII

I have recently made a correction to some illustrations of APL keyboards on my web site.

It was difficult for me to find the information which enabled me to definitively determine the positions of the opening and closing brace characters on an APL-ASCII keyboard.

An illustration in Gilman and Rose gave the opening brace as being in the shifted position of its key.

I have been able to see clearly in some illustrations of old-style typewriter-pairing keyboards that the open square bracket was in the unshifted portion of the key.

This seemed to imply the paradoxical result that the two braces in ASCII represented the two braces, but interchanged, in APL. And I had so illustrated APL-ASCII keyboards on my site.

However, since then I found the original paper defining the APL-ASCII standard on the web. It noted that "left brace" was in the unshifted position - but did not give an image of the character. (Left tack and right tack are *completely* ambiguous, but I believe I had previously found an image which resolved that portion of the issue for me.)

In any event, I found online documentation for the Decwriter III. This had the braces and square brackets arranged like a bit-pairing keyboard on an otherwise typewriter-pairing keyboard - this improvement to the typewriter-pairing arrangement, of course, is also found on the PC keyboard. Anyways, a chart of the codes of the APL characters clearly showed that the braces in APL corresponded to the same characters, not the opposites, in ASCII.

So I have made the appropriate correction...

but if anyone knows that my site is *still* in error, on the pages

and

do let me know. I definitely do not wish my site to "rewrite history" if it can be avoided.

John Savard