OT; Groan

I used to mark zeroes with a line through them back in my early coding days but the convention seems to have disappeared and, as someone else has pointed out, there seem to be some places where it's the letter O that has a line through.

My screen font puts a dot in the middle of zeroes.

IME the line through the O was horizontal, not diagonal.

Not on a Commodore 64 :)

Possibly not. My experience was mainly with ICL coding sheets.

here :)

I know a bit about that font as I ripped it off the ROM to use on a bit of homebrew electronics in 1988 that needed an 8x8 font.

Well, one guy wrote the code, and he used a font which clearly distinguished between o & 0, 1 & I etc. etc, because it's obvious that's what you need to do.

Another bod came along and designed the "User Experience", which demanded the use of a stylish font.

I said (but it was snipped) the line through the O was horizontal.

Not the line through the 0. :-)

IME it was diagonal. I suspect the coding conventions came from whichever computer manufacturer you had.

Mine was Elliott.

Yebbut that's not particularly harmful (are the hackers really going to take the trouble to omit trying the *allegedly* unused characters?).

And if you did have a target security level then making the password one or two characters longer would surely make up for a slightly smaller character set.

I still put a diagonal line across all my 0's and a horizontal line in the middle of my Z's (to distinguish from 2's) to my kids amusement. That's what we were taught when doing engineering at uni.

Good idea that I've always put a horizontal line thru the middle of a 7 to make it look different to a 2

In message , Tim Lamb writes

It's all Greek to me.

Yes. You'd use the chracters that can be used in the password the less usable characteres the easier it is to crack. If you knowe that the only chracters availible for use were 1s and 0s i.e binary would you really check ofr ABCs etc... I doubt hackers would.

It would be having a 200 1 or 0 character password is less practical than a 5 character one using ANY character.

Doesn't that make you German ;-)

to confuse things further, surely for a Swede an O with a line through it would be the letter "err" (as in A B D E F G.... U V W X Y Z 'ah' 'err' 'orr')

The geezer's name was Øveras. To the Geneva Services Industriels, electricity provider, he was ever after known as Mr Veras, and that is what appeared on his bills.

how do the greeks tell phi from zero?

IBM occasionally used a zero with a dot in the middle to have a displayable difference between the letter capital 'O' and the digit zero.

Unfortunately, at small font sizes, and on low definition displays, it can resemble the digit 8.

Sid.