Designing a
character set is not just an exercise in
linguistics and
typography, sometimes
politics gets into play as well. The most
notorious example of this is the
international (aka
generic)
currency
symbol ¤.
Staging: The year is 1972 and both the Cold War and the Computer Revolution are well under way.
The 7-bit ASCII character set, more formally dubbed ANSI X3.4 in 1968,
is finally starting to supplant the dreaded EBCDIC... so much so, in fact,
that the International Standardization Organization (ISO) wants to make it
into the first international standardized character set, under the
name ISO 646. The reason you have never heard of this is that its woefully limited
repertoire of characters was only enough for Latin, Swahili, Hawaiian
and American English, but never mind the details, the real problem
blocking its adoption was its inherent capitalist bias:
The only currency symbol in the set was the dollar sign ($).
And surely the mighty
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, acting in
socialist solidarity
with the other
communist states of the world, could not be expected to
tolerate such
insidious propaganda, now could they? But neither were the
Yanks very keen on adding a
ruble symbol. So with true diplomatic
inventiveness, a
compromise was hammered out:
The dollar sign would be replaced with a neutral international currency
symbol.
The slight snag here was that there was no such thing as an "international
currency" and even less was there a symbol for it -- so one was
invented!
Alas, I haven't been able to find out exactly what "¤" is supposed to
represent; some have theorized that it should look like an empty circle so
you can draw something in it, but in most modern fonts the symbol has been
reduced to a flyspeck resembling an
alien in
Space Invaders.
Mundane considerations of logic aside, with this hurdle passed ISO 646 became a
roaring success adopted worldwide, with over 180
national variants introduced. A few countries substituted their own currency
symbols on top of the international symbol, but most European countries preferred
convenient EDI with American systems and used ASCII's dollar! This was also the
approach taken by the 8-bit ISO 8859-1 character set (Latin-1), but as a
sop to the
socialist block the ¤ sign was kept hanging in there, albeit moved into the
high-ASCII block at hex A4, next to the new ¢, £ and ¥
symbols. And so to this day, this entirely unused legacy symbol lives on,
both in Unicode as U+00A4 CURRENCY SYMBOL and in HTML as
¤.
But the capitalists eventually had their revenge. In 1991, soon after the fall of
the Berlin Wall, ISO 646 was revised to officially make it equivalent to
ISO 646-US (ASCII) and eliminate the ¤ sign. To complete this
revision of history, in 1999 ISO approved ISO 8859-15, whose primary
change is to place a real international currency sign, the
euro (€), on top of the artificial, non-existent one.
References
http://www.iso.org/
http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso646.html