On the other hand, and uncommon for programming languages up to that time, C provides symbols for bitwise operations. Therefore no symbol needs to be set aside for exponentiation in C, and other, later, languages in the C-family, such as C++ and CUDA. It does not provide an exponentiation operator, rather it supports exponentiation via library functions such as pow(). The C language came into existence in 1972. Around the same time IBM adopted the EBCDIC character encoding, which also includes the caret ^. The oldest programming language I am aware of that used the caret to denote exponentiation is BASIC, which dates to 1964. The first widely adopted character set that contained the caret ^ was the 7-bit ASCII encoding which was first standardized in 1963. The use of ** was subsequently adopted by creators of various more recent programming languages that offer an exponentiation operation, such as Python. It should be noted that many computers at that time used 6-bit character encodings that did not provide a caret character ^. The exponentiation operation is denoted by a double asterisk **.

This is the notation still universally used in mathematics today.ДЇortran is the oldest programming language widely used for numerical computations that provides an exponentiation operator, it dates to 1954. Although there were older precursors, the influential French mathematician Rene Descartes is usually credited for introducing superscripted exponents (a b) into mathematical writing, in his work Geometrie which was published in 1637.

Double caret symbol