GOST 10859 (1964) is a standard of the
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...
which defined how to encode data on
punched card
A punched card (also punch card or punched-card) is a piece of stiff paper that holds digital data represented by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions. Punched cards were once common in data processing applications or to di ...
s. This standard allowed a variable
word size, depending on the type of data being encoded, but only uppercase characters.
These include the non-ASCII “decimal exponent symbol” . It was used to express
real numbers in
scientific notation
Scientific notation is a way of expressing numbers that are too large or too small (usually would result in a long string of digits) to be conveniently written in decimal form. It may be referred to as scientific form or standard index form, o ...
. For example: 6.0221415⏨23.
The character was also part of the
ALGOL
ALGOL (; short for "Algorithmic Language") is a family of imperative computer programming languages originally developed in 1958. ALGOL heavily influenced many other languages and was the standard method for algorithm description used by the ...
programming language specifications and was incorporated into the then German character encoding standard
ALCOR. GOST 10859 also included numerous other ''non-ASCII'' characters/symbols useful to ALGOL programmers, e.g.: ∨, ∧, ⊃, ≡, ¬, ≠, ↑, ↓, ×, ÷, ≤, ≥, °, &, ∅, compare with
ALGOL operators.
Character sets
See also
*
KOI-7 (GOST 13052-67)
*
KOI-8
KOI-8 (КОИ-8) is an 8-bit character set standardized in GOST 19768-74. Маркелова Л. Н. Эксплуатация программоуправляемой вычислительной машины «Искра 226». — М.: Ма ...
(GOST 19768-74)
References
* ГОСТ 10859-64. Машины вычислительные. Коды алфавитно-цифровые для перфокарт и перфолент.
GOST 10859(from the Computer Museum of University of Amsterdam)
Further reading
*
{{character encoding
Cyrillic alphabet representations
Character sets
GOST standards
Russian-language computing
Computing in the Soviet Union