Another example of this theme is that exponentiation in APL is written as "", which indicates raising 2 to the power 3 (this would be written as "" in some other languages and "" in FORTRAN and Python): many languages use * to signify multiplication as in 2*3 but APL uses for that. However, if no base is specified (as with the statement "" in APL, or "" in other languages), in most other programming languages one would have a syntax error. APL however assumes the missing base to be the natural logarithm constant e (2.71828...), and so interpreting "" as "".