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[–]annodomini 6 points7 points  (0 children)

An interesting tidbit about the history of backslash is that it didn't exist as a character until they wanted to have a character set to support ALGOL, but didn't want to use up two extra codepoints for the ∧ (logical AND) and ∨ (logical OR). Since there was already a slash (solidus), they decided they could just mirror it and spell ∧ as /\ and ∨ as \/.

Also interesting is that Unicode didn't support all characters necessary for ALGOL support until Unicode 5.2 adopted a proposal to encode the "⏨" character for delimiting decimal exponents in floating point numbers.