> Back in the Before-Before, the grapheme in ASCII at the codepoint ^ is now was an up-arrow character, which is why BASIC uses ^ for exponentiation even though

> Back in the Before-Before, the grapheme in ASCII at the codepoint ^ is now was an up-arrow character, which is why BASIC uses ^ for exponentiation even though FORTRAN, which came first and which early BASIC dialects greatly copied, uses . That is, two asterisks in a row.