Exactly as the question says, for education purposes, why did C choose the operators they choose for their corresponding operations. For & of course its simply read "and" so this would make sense. However, I see no connection between & and address or % and modulus or * and pointer. This being said I also don't see a connection between pointer and any real symbol available on the keyboard. Why were these symbols chosen? Were they simply arbitrary? Thanks.
If you look at the ASCII table (the standardized first 128 characters) you can see that the choice of characters are quite limited. They simply had no other choice of symbol for those operators.
Except the $, @ and the ` (backtick) characters all printable characters are used.
Probably the first computers C developed on didn't have these three characters in their character set.
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