why caret symbol prints only after pressing another key

[miguel7808]

why caret symbol prints only after pressing another key
I dont have it over the  "6" key.
I have a spanish keyboard, and the caret ^ is together with the "{" key.

The caret needs the Alt-Gr key to be used.

But the ^ does not print right away, I need to type something else, then the caret shows up.

Why is this?

[BC_Programmer]

because it's not a caret, it's a circumflex, and is intended to go <with> another character- for example, "Â".

In many cases the keyboard doesn't have a specific way to insert things like carets and grave accents with a single keypress; generally, the method used is to press the grave combination (as you are doing) and press space to make it appear.

[Salmon Trout]

it's not a caret, it's a circumflex, and is intended to go <with> another character- for example, "Â".

Thus speaks an anglophone... 

The symbol that you would call a caret in English that looks like a little roof, when used alone, is a character in its own right; the circonflexes or circumflexes that you see over certain characters in non-English alphabets are an integral part of those characters. Rather than having an extra key for each accented character, non-English keyboards are made with the scheme that miguel7808 has noticed, namely that you signify an accent (acento circunflejo) by typing a "dead key" then type the unaccented character. To get a caret alone, the next character should be a space.

Incidentally, did you know that in Italian the caret is often used to signify that a number is ordinal, (as the st, nd and rd do in 1st 2nd 3rd in English) thus 1^ is used to signify 1st, and 2^ to signify 2nd, and so on. This is because the ASCII character set lacks the ordinal indicator, a superscripted little dash and a circle (-o)  or a (-a) depending on whether the number's grammatical gender is masculine or feminine respectively.