GOST 10859 (1964) is a standard of the

Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

which defined how to encode data on

punched card A punched card (also punch card or punched-card) is a stiff paper-based medium used to store digital information via the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions. Developed over the 18th to 20th centuries, punched cards were widel ...

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 mathematics, a real number is a number that can be used to measurement, measure a continuous variable, continuous one-dimensional quantity such as a time, duration or temperature. Here, ''continuous'' means that pairs of values can have arbi ...

scientific notation Scientific notation is a way of expressing numbers that are too large or too small to be conveniently written in decimal form, since to do so would require writing out an inconveniently long string of digits. It may be referred to as scientif ...

. 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

References

* ГОСТ 10859-64. Машины вычислительные. Коды алфавитно-цифровые для перфокарт и перфолент.
GOST 10859
(from the Computer Museum of University of Amsterdam)

Character sets

See also

References

Further reading