eric@snark.thyrsus.com (Eric S. Raymond) (01/01/91)
I'm trying to find a source for the use of ^ as an exponentiation operator in on-line chat and flat-ASCII documents. It has been suggested that the 3-1 USENET preference for ^ over FORTRAN ** is due to UNIX bc/dc, but the usage seems to predate UNIX (it was evidently common on ITS, too). It seems likely that both the bc/dc use and ITS use have a common root in some notation or computer language, but I have no idea which one it might be. C, Pascal, Fortran, Ada, Basic, APL, COBOL, and LISP are all right out, and I doubt it came from any assembler :-). Has anyone got any idea about this? -- Eric S. Raymond = eric@snark.thyrsus.com (mad mastermind of TMN-Netnews)