Yes, the ‘dual use’ characters were define at the request of European delegations and the language makes it clear that it was expected that English-language terminals would continue to have &quot; look like &quot; and not ¨ and so on. ASCII was defined before video terminals were developed, so no one thought overstriking was remarkable. As it turned out, non-English European language versions ended up not generally using overstrikes anyway, but redefined the ‘national use’ characters #$@[\]{|} instead, which unfortunately did lead to ambiguity.