GOST 10859

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GOST 10859 (1964) is a standard of the Soviet Union which defined how to encode data on punched cards. 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 scientific notation. For example: 6.0221415⏨23.

The ⏨ character was also part of the ALGOL 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

GOST 10859 4-bit code: Binary-coded decimal
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F
0x 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 + - / , . DEL
GOST 10859 5-bit code: with BCD & mathematical operators
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F
0x 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 + - / , .  SP 
1x ⏨ ↑ ( ) × = ; [ ] * ‘ ’ ≠ < > DEL
GOST 10859 6-bit code: with only Cyrillic upper-case letters
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F
0x 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 + - / , .  SP 
1x ⏨ ↑ ( ) × = ; [ ] * ‘ ’ ≠ < > :
2x А Б В Г Д Е Ж З И Й К Л М Н О П
3x Р С Т У Ф Х Ц Ч Ш Щ Ы Ь Э Ю Я DEL
GOST 10859 7-bit code: Cyrillic and Latin upper-case letters
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F
0x 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 + - / , .  SP 
1x ⏨ ↑ ( ) × = ; [ ] * ‘ ’ ≠ < > :
2x А Б В Г Д Е Ж З И Й К Л М Н О П
3x Р С Т У Ф Х Ц Ч Ш Щ Ы Ь Э Ю Я D
4x F G I J L N Q R S U V W Z ‾ ≤ ≥
5x ∨ ∧ ⊃ ¬ ÷ ≡ % ◊ | — _ ! " Ъ ° '
6x → ← ? ↓ ∅ ± ∇
7x DEL
  Cyrillic and Latin letters with identical (A, B, C, E, H, K, M, O, P, T, X) and similar (Y/У) glyphs were unified.
GOST 10859 6-bit code: with only Latin upper-case letters
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F
0x 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 + - / , .  SP 
1x ⏨ ↑ ( ) × = ; [ ] * ‘ ’ ≠ < > :
2x A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P
3x Q R S T U V W X Y Z ∨ ∧ ⊃ ¬ ÷ DEL

See also

References

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

Further reading

  • Savard, John J. G. (2018) [2005]. "Computer Arithmetic". quadibloc. The Early Days of Hexadecimal. Archived from the original on 2018-07-16. Retrieved 2018-07-16.