In signs one sees an advantage for discovery that is greatest when they express the exact nature of a thing briefly and, as it were, picture it; then, indeed, the labour of thought is wonderfully diminished Leibniz Icons are today used in many programming systems—to simplify man-machine communication. Does this represent something new and important or is it just a sales argument similar, for example, to the 'removal' of formulas in Cobol, by replacing the mathematical symbols by English words? In order to answer this question we will examine the use of icons in man-machine interfaces, comparing this usage with the q ualities of icons. In doing this we will rely on the fundamental work on signs of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) about the turn of the century (Hartshorne and Weiss 1965).
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