[pavlov]

It’s fundamentally a Unixism, like the tilde and some other characters used in C family languages that don’t exist on many European keyboards.

If you look back 30-50 years, most of the popular programming languages like Pascal and BASIC used a very limited character set. Instead of symbols like various brackets and tilde and backtick, they used keywords. This was intentional because they were designed to be possible to type on various Latin keyboards.

But Unix and C were developed by American hackers who had no reason not to use all the ASCII characters available on the Teletype-whatever connected to the PDP-whatever. And that’s the path we ended up on.

In the 1980s the C standard committee tried to address this problem by adding support for trigraphs. There’s a whole set of three-character symbols (identified by a prefix of two question marks) that can be used in C code in place of curly brackets and all the rest of the exotic ASCII set. But I’ve never seen anyone use this, and I think trigraphs are scheduled for removal in C.