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?

  • fubo@lemmy.world
    21·
    1 year ago

    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, ⍋ is the “sort” function.