The humble tilde (~) symbol, which is located left of the "1" key, has a few notable uses. It can represent approximations, which is useful in mathematics and statistics, and is found as an accent over letters in languages like Spanish and Portuguese. You've probably spent some time hunting for it on a keyboard when spelling stuff like "mañana." However, its primary use on a computer keyboard is as a tool in programming languages C, C++ and Java, among many others.
This has actually been a handy little key going back decades. It first appeared on computer keyboards all the way back in 1965, back in the days of massive mainframes. It has since…
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