It respected the standard rules for operator precedence, allowed nested parentheses, and used superscripts to indicate exponents.
The system also automated the following tasks: floating point computation, linkage to subroutines for the basic functions of analysis (sine, etc.)
Like other programming notations of its time, the system accepted only single-letter variable names and multiplication was indicated by juxtaposition of operands.
A raised dot was available to indicate multiplication explicitly (the character was created by filing off the lower half of a colon!)
John W. Backus himself admitted to having contributed to this misconception: The effect of the Laning and Zierler system on the development of FORTRAN is a question which has been muddled by many misstatements on my part.
For many years I believed that we had gotten the idea for using algebraic notation in FORTRAN from seeing a demonstration of the Laning and Zierler system at MIT.
(Backus[2])After reviewing documentation from the time, Backus learned that the FORTRAN project was "well underway" when he and his team got a chance to see Laning and Zierler's work: [W]e were already considering algebraic input considerably more sophisticated than that of Laning and Zierler's system when we first heard of their pioneering work ... [I]t is difficult to know what, if any, new ideas we got from seeing the demonstration of their system.