BCD, actually, given that Fortran dates from the mid-1950s. EBCDIC only appeared more or less around Fortran IV, in the early 1960s. Many printers in those days had a 48-character chain/train. After upper-case letters, digits, and a few essential punctuation marks (like . and ,), you weren't left with many options. The 60-character set of PL/I was a luxury back then, let alone lower case.

Hmm, I guess you're right. Also EBCDIC does have ^ apparently, though not ↑: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBCDIC#Code_page_layout

But IBM's BCD character sets, including the 48-character ones you allude to, didn't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCD_(character_encoding)#Examp... (though Honeywell's did)

There are a lot of decisions in Fortran that stem from the absence of useful characters. .LT., .LE., .EQ., .NE., .GT., and .GE. is another.

C uses ^ for bitwise xor and a function for exponentiation, though.

No, C does not have an exponentiation operator! Possibly you meant "and not a function for exponentiation".

I should have said "followed Fortran rather than BASIC".

I meant exactly what I said. C uses a function for exponentiation. Nothing that uses ^ for powers follows C's lead.

https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/numeric/math/pow.html

Oh, I interpreted "a function for exponentiation" as being part of a list of things C uses ^ for. It didn't even occur to me that the sentence had an alternative parsing where it was part of a list of things C uses. C does indeed use a function for exponentiation. And time flies like an arrow!

He's explaining that C was not the reason for picking * over ^