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€“] marcos@lemmy.world 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It was a noisy co-evolution where both languages and keyboards keep changing to best fit each other.

While the letter layout of our keyboards is heavily influenced by typewriters, the set of symbols on them changed a lot with times, and for some times there was a lot of diversity on them. Our current design is as much a result of languages like MPL never really popularizing as much as the lack of adoption of those languages is a result of the popular keyboard designs.

[โ€“] vashti 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah. 7-bit ASCII goes back to what, the 60s? But computers still used different encodings and so different keyboards for A While.