GOST 10859
In 1964 the GOST standards body of the Soviet Union defined the standard for encoding data. This standard allowed a variable character size - depending on the type of data being encoded.
GOST 10859 only allowed uppercase characters. Subsequent Soviet standards included lowercase:
These include the non-ASCII "⏨" (Decimal Exponent Symbol U+23E8). 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 also 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.: ∨, ∧, ⊃, ≡, ¬, ≠, ↑, ↓, ×, ÷, ≤, ≥, ° & ∅. c.f. ALGOL operators.
The "␡" character served the same function as the "␡" in 7-bit ASCII.
4-bit code: Binary coded decimal
5-bit code: with BCD & mathematical operators
6-bit code: with only Cyrillic upper case letters
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