Did you know... (3)

[pne]

...that Braille on a computer has eight dots instead of only six, and that this enables capital letters to be distinguished from lower-case ones by the addition of an extra dot rather than requiring a separate "capitaliser" symbol?

(From an e-mail exchange of mine with Senara, who is blind.)

Comments

[eilanhp.livejournal.com]

Why eight, then and not seven?

Computer braille

[pne.livejournal.com]

Well, you probably know that normal Braille has six dots arranged in two columns of three each; I suppose it made more sense to keep the arrangement symmetrical by adding a dot to the bottom of each column, so you have 2×4 now.

Plus this way you can also represent all the symbols a computer needs such as {} «» @ etc. etc. without "running out" so quickly... ASCII only has 2⁷ possibilities and that's a bit limiting sometimes.

But I don't know for sure.