新未名空间

所有人从小开始学的算符×÷，后来竟然几乎都不用了。甚至电脑键盘上也没有它俩。
如果是这样，为什么不从一开始就用点或星表示乘法，用斜线或冒号表示除法呢？

确实很属实

On a traditional typewriter, the divide symbol ÷ was created by typing a minus - over a colon : and multiply × was typically represented by an x. While some typewriters catered for basic fractions ¼, ½, ¾ with the correct horizontal bar between them, it was impractical to represent every fraction this way, and the / became the preferred method: 1/4, 1/2, 3/4, 2/3 etc. until it caught on as a general style that was even incorporated into typesetting.

As the first real electronic character set was lifted directly from the extremely limited number of characters available on a teletype machine, divide and multiply just didn’t exist. It was recognised by early developers that / could remain the stand-in for divide, but that x really couldn’t be expected to serve as both a standard letter and as a mathematical instruction, so * was adopted instead.

Within the world of coding, these two symbols remain “standard”. With modern extended character sets and fonts, the “correct” symbols can be used typographically, but they remain meaningless to a code interpreter or compiler.

计算机键盘里有一个计算器子键盘，里面有+有-，但是乘除是*和/。