this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
74 points (95.1% liked)

Programming

17524 readers
618 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
snowe@programming.dev
Ategon@programming.dev
MaungaHikoi@lemmy.nz
74
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
40 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] Die4Ever@programming.dev 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I won't consider any keyboard to be designed for programming unless it has dedicated keys for characters like {}() < >_+| & !*:" without needing to hold shift for them (Lemmy seems to be improperly escaping my less-than sign and ampersand)

[โ€“] driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br 5 points 1 year ago

There's "programming" layouts, like dvorak-programming that replace the number rows for special characters and you need to shift to get the numbers.