Would You Use a "Running Semicolon" Character?

[SASKiwi]

@Tom  - LOL, actually this was even before IBM PCs were available in my neck of the woods. Green screen IBM 3270 terminals were the thing back then. 

[Tom]

Before the IBM PC (IBM Model number 5150) there was the IBM 5100.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_5100

It came with APL and BASIC.  You could flip a switch before turning it on to decide which environment you wanted to use.

[Kurt_Bremser]

Concur with @AlanC on this one. I am VERY glad that I can open and edit SAS programs with any simple text editor on any platform (vi on UNIX!), regardless of used character set (ASCII or EBCDIC) or encoding capabilities.