Editing ALGOL (section)

===Timeline of ALGOL special characters===
{{Contains special characters
| alt        = Decimal Exponent Symbol
| link       = http://mailcom.com/unicode/DecimalExponent.ttf
| special    = Unicode 6.0 "[https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2300.pdf Miscellaneous Technical]" characters
| fix        = Unicode#External_links
| characters = something like "₁₀" ([http://mailcom.com/unicode/DecimalExponent.ttf Decimal Exponent Symbol U+23E8 TTF])
}}
The ALGOLs were conceived at a time when character sets were diverse and evolving rapidly; also, the ALGOLs were defined so that only ''uppercase'' letters were required.

1960: [[IFIP]] – The Algol 60 language and report included several mathematical symbols which are available on modern computers and operating systems, but, unfortunately, were unsupported on most computing systems at the time. For instance: ×, ÷, ≤, ≥, ≠, ¬, ∨, ∧, ⊂, ≡, ␣ and ⏨.

1961 September: ASCII – The [[ASCII]] character set, then in an early stage of development, had the [[/|\]] (Back slash) character added to it in order to support ALGOL's [[Boolean data type|Boolean]] operators [[ALGOL 68#Dyadic operators with associated priorities|/\]] and [[ALGOL 68#Dyadic operators with associated priorities|\/]].<ref>[http://www.bobbemer.com/BACSLASH.HTM How ASCII Got Its Backslash] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140711225835/http://bobbemer.com/BACSLASH.HTM |date=11 July 2014}}, Bob Bemer</ref>

1962: [[ALCOR]] – This character set included the unusual "᛭"<!-- U+16ED --> runic cross<ref>[https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/16ed/ iron/runic cross]</ref> character for multiplication and the "⏨" Decimal Exponent Symbol<ref>[http://mailcom.com/unicode/DecimalExponent.ttf Decimal Exponent Symbol]</ref> for floating point notation.<ref>{{cite journal |last=Baumann |first=R. |title=ALGOL Manual of the ALCOR Group, Part 1 |journal=Elektronische Rechenanlagen |date=October 1961 |pages=206–212 |language=de|trans-title=ALGOL Manual of the ALCOR Group}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last=Baumann |first=R. |title=ALGOL Manual of the ALCOR Group, Part 2 |journal=Elektronische Rechenanlagen |volume=6 |date=December 1961 |pages=259–265 |language=de|trans-title=ALGOL Manual of the ALCOR Group}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last=Baumann |first=R. |title=ALGOL Manual of the ALCOR Group, Part 3 |journal=Elektronische Rechenanlagen |volume=2 |date=April 1962 |language=de|trans-title=ALGOL Manual of the ALCOR Group}}</ref>

1964: [[GOST]] – The 1964 Soviet standard [[GOST 10859]] allowed the encoding of 4-bit, 5-bit, 6-bit and 7-bit characters in ALGOL.<ref>{{cite web|title=GOST 10859 standard |url=http://homepages.cwi.nl/~dik/english/codes/stand.html#gost10859 |access-date=5 June 2007 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070616201227/http://homepages.cwi.nl/~dik/english/codes/stand.html |archive-date=16 June 2007 |url-status=dead}}</ref>

1968: The "Algol 68 Report" – used extant ALGOL characters, and further adopted →, ↓, ↑, □, ⌊, ⌈, ⎩, ⎧, ○, ⊥, and ¢ characters which can be found on the [[IBM 2741]] keyboard with ''[[IBM Selectric typewriter|typeball]]'' (or ''golf ball'') [[Printer (computing)#Typewriter-derived printers|print heads]] inserted (such as the [[APL (programming language)#Hardware|APL golf ball]]). These became available in the mid-1960s while ALGOL 68 was being drafted.  The report was translated into Russian, German, French, and Bulgarian, and allowed programming in languages with larger character sets, e.g., [[Cyrillic]] alphabet of the Soviet [[BESM]]-4. All ALGOL's characters are also part of the [[Unicode]] standard and most of them are available in several popular [[font]]s.

2009 October: [[Unicode]] – The <code>⏨</code> (Decimal Exponent Symbol) for floating point notation was added to Unicode 5.2 for backward compatibility with historic [[Buran programme]] ALGOL software.<ref>{{cite web
 |url         = https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2008/08030r-subscript10.pdf
 |title       = Revised proposal to encode the decimal exponent symbol
 |last        = Broukhis
 |first       = Leonid
 |date        = 22 January 2008
 |website     = www.unicode.org
 |publisher   = ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2/WG 2
 |access-date = 24 January 2016
 |quote       = This means that the need to transcode GOST-based software and documentation can still arise: legacy numerical algorithms (some of which may be of interest, e.g. for the automatic landing of the Buran shuttle ...) optimized for the non-IEEE floating point representation of BESM-6 cannot be simply recompiled and be expected to work reliably, and some human intervention may be necessary.
 |url-status  = live
 |archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20150731024347/http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2008/08030r-subscript10.pdf
 |archive-date=31 July 2015
}}</ref>