this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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Programming

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Are the characters used in syntax of most programming languages dependent on the keys of the standard keyboard or was the standard keyboard made specifically to allow programming with these keys? (lemm.ee)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by sylowosa@lemm.ee to c/programming@programming.dev
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The title would probably be confusing, but I could not make it better than this. I noticed that most programming languages are limited to the alphanumerical set along with the special characters present in a general keyboard. I wondered if this posed a barrier for developers on what characters they were limited to program in, or if it was intentional from the start that these keys would be the most optimal characters for a program to be coded in by a human and was later adopted as a standard for every user. Basically, are the modern keyboards built around programming languages or are programming languages built around these keyboards?

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[โ€“] fubo@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

C supports alternate ways of typing some of its punctuation, for programmers whose keyboards didn't support them all. For example, if you can't type [ ] you can use ??( ??) instead. (There are other ones that use angle brackets, but I can't type them here because Lemmy escapes them incorrectly. Irony.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraphs_and_trigraphs#C

The usual example of a programming language using especially unusual characters is APL, where all built-in functions are all represented by single characters, mostly drawn from mathematical notations, Greek alphabet, and so on. For example, โ‹ is the "sort" function.