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?

sylowosa@lemm.ee to Programming@programming.dev – 73 points –

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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@snowe @themoonisacheese I can type ¹ on a smartphone pretty easily

Are you typing the character or using markdown to accomplish that?

@snowe Typing the character. With GBoard it's switch to numbers+symbols then press and hold a number (in this case 1) to access fractions and superscripts.

Hmm Gboard on iphone doesn't do that. Strange. I can hold plenty of other letters and numbers (like 0 to get °), but not 1-9.

@snowe not sure if this image attachment is going to federate correctly from Mastodon to Lemmy

It did not. Cool to see federation between mastodon and lemmy though!

@snowe It's got its quirks. For example, if I am replying to someone who's not on programming.dev then I have to make sure to tag @programming (or another account on the instance) in order for my post to still federate to your server, otherwise only the person I'm replying to would see my reply and it wouldn't show in comments.

I did discover that adding the tag as a trailing reply to a missing comment thread will cause the entire reply chain to federate, so that's neat.

@snowe if not, I'll try markdown:
image

Woah that’s cool. Wonder why it’s not on iOS. It’s clearly not a limitation, so I’m just guessing google doesn’t want to.

@snowe a very common reason with Google products, I've found; up to and including not wanting to provide that product anymore.

😂 yeah, that's why I've been trying to stop using google entirely, it's just asking to lose data or lose a workflow you use, or whatever. I got sick and tired of it.

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