programming and human factors
by Jeff Atwood
As programmers, we deal with a lot of unusual keyboard characters that typical users rarely need to type, much less think about:
$ # % {} * [] ~ & <>
Even the characters that are fairly regularly used in everyday writing -- such as the humble dash, parens, period, and question mark -- have radically different meaning in programming languages.
This is all well and good, but you'll eventually have to read code out loud to another developer for some reason. And then you're in an awkward position, indeed.
How do you pronounce these unusual ASCII characters?
We all do it, but we don't necessarily think much about the words we choose. I certainly hadn't thought much about this until yesterday, when I read the following comment left on Exploring Wide Finder:
A friend sent me a Java code fragment in which he looped through printing "Thank You!" a million times (it was a response to a professor who had extended the deadline on a paper). I responded with a single line of Ruby to do the same, and a single line of Lisp.He wrote back: "Underscores, pipes, octothorpes, curly braces -- sheesh... I'll take a mild dose of verbosity if means I don't have to code something that looks like it's been zipped already!"
What the heck is an octothorpe? I know this as the pound key, but that turns out to be a US-centric word; most other cultures know it as the hash key.
I'm often surprised to hear what other programmers name their ASCII characters. Not that the words I personally use to identify my ASCII characters are any more correct, but there's far more variability than you'd expect considering the rigid, highly literal mindset of most programmers.
Perhaps that's why I was so excited to discover the ASCII entry in The New Hacker's Dictionary, which Phil Glockner turned me on to. It's a fairly exhaustive catalog of the common names, rare names, and occasionally downright weird names that programmers associate with the ASCII characters sprinkled throughout their code.
How many of these ASCII pronunciations do you recognize? Which ones are the "correct" ones in your shop?
| Common Names | Rare Names | |||||
| ! |
exclamation mark bang pling excl not shriek |
|
||||
| " |
quotation marks quote double quote |
|
||||
| # |
|
|
||||
| $ |
dollar sign dollar |
|
||||
| % |
percent sign mod grapes |
double-oh-seven | ||||
| & |
ampersand amp amper and and sign |
address reference andpersand bitand background pretzel |
||||
| ' |
apostrophe single quote quote |
|
||||
| ( ) |
opening / closing parenthesis left / right paren left / right parenthesis left / right open / close open / close paren paren / thesis |
so/already lparen/rparen opening/closing parenthesis opening/closing round bracket left/right round bracket wax/wane parenthisey/unparenthisey left/right ear |
||||
| [ ] |
opening / closing bracket left / right bracket left / right square bracket bracket / unbracket |
square / unsquare u turn / u turn back |
||||
| { } |
opening / closing brace open / close brace left / right brace left / right squiggly left / right squiggly bracket/brace left / right curly bracket/brace |
brace / unbrace curly / uncurly leftit / rytit left / right squirrelly embrace / bracelet |
||||
| < > |
less / greater than bra / ket left / right angle left / right angle bracket left / right broket |
from / into (or towards) read from / write to suck / blow comes-from / gozinta in / out crunch / zap tic / tac angle / right angle |
||||
| * |
asterisk star splat |
|
||||
| + |
plus add |
cross intersection |
||||
| , | comma |
cedilla tail |
||||
| - |
dash hyphen minus |
worm option dak bithorpe |
||||
| . |
period dot point decimal point |
radix point full stop spot |
||||
| / |
slash stroke slant forward slash |
diagonal solidus over slak virgule slat |
||||
| \ |
|
bash reverse slant reversed virgule backslat |
||||
| : | colon |
dots two-spot |
||||
| ; |
semicolon semi |
weenie hybrid pit-thwong |
||||
| = |
equals gets takes |
quadrathorpe half-mesh |
||||
| ? |
question mark query ques |
|
||||
| @ |
at sign at strudel |
|
||||
| ^ |
circumflex caret hat control uparrow |
xor sign chevron shark (or shark-fin) to the fang pointer |
||||
| _ |
underline underscore underbar under |
score backarrow skid flatworm |
||||
| ` |
grave accent backquote left quote left single quote open quote grave |
|
||||
| | |
bar or or-bar v-bar pipe vertical bar |
vertical line gozinta thru pipesinta spike |
||||
| ~ |
tilde squiggle twiddle not |
approx wiggle swung dash enyay sqiggle (sic) |
If you're curious about the derivation of some of the odder names here, there are an extensive set of footnotes (and even more possible pronunciations) at the ascii-table.com pronunciation guide.
So the next time a programmer walks up to you and says, "oh, it's easy! Just type wax bang at hash buck grapes circumflex and splat wane", you'll know what they mean.
Maybe.
In the UK:-
() - brackets
[] - square brackets
{} - curly brackets
I would like to bring this into the limelight that some people use start/stop parenthesis, bracket and braces for (), [] and {} respectively. Using this convention allows listener to clearly visualize what speaker is trying to convey.
Mohit Soni on June 12, 2008 12:25 PMevery technical speaker should read this.
Caleb Cushing on June 12, 2008 12:29 PMIn Python they use a lot of double underscores. I've heard of a movement to call that character combo a "dunder" as in __mifflin
Nik Molnar on June 12, 2008 12:33 PMI don't know how this originated, but growing up (in Florida) my programmer friends and I called '{' '}' "french brackets/braces". I've never found anyone else who used those terms, and I don't know where they originated.
Paul on June 12, 2008 12:36 PMI would like to take this opportunity to take the bold, prescriptive stance that
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A FORWARD SLASH, AND NO SUCH THING AS A BACKWARD SLASH.
There is a slash. There is a backslash. That is all.
Atario on June 12, 2008 12:41 PMUm, a cedille has nothing to do with a comma.
Andrew on June 12, 2008 12:56 PMAn old teacher of mine consistently called [ and ] "sub" and "bus", respectively. It has a nice symmetry to it, don't you think?
Peter on June 12, 2008 12:56 PMHI,
Really a nice topic to talk on, It would be fun if we all try this thing among ourselves and check what we all pronounce..This is certainly going to b a fun Session for me on next weekend...Thanks for a nice list and a excellent idea...
And i was amased to c the "@" is called APE, ROSE, CAT and CABBAGE????
How this name came upon?????
We generally use the word 'sub' for the underscore in code reviews. Its faster as one syllable.
Corporate Drone on June 12, 2008 12:57 PMA professor at my university taught me and everyone else on the course to say 'fnut' for ' and 'double-fnut' for ". It is now the standard term for those characters among the students.
I'm not sure about the American Qwerty keyboard, but at least on the Norwegian it is very difficult to reach those characters. The tilde for example, will only appear if you enter some other letter after it. To get only a single tilde you are forced to enter it twice and then delete the second one.
Someone should design a keyboard for programmers where all the special keys are easy to reach and can be entered with a single keystroke.
Marius Gundersen on June 12, 2008 1:02 PMFor some unknown reason my RSS reader has some difficulties reading this post and listing it. I am using "iGoogle" RSS gadget with the last three entries listed. And this lastest one just doesn't appear. It was even weirder earlier today because then the list was just toootally corrupted.
I guess iGoogle RSS gadget doesn't like all those strange characters. Maybe one of those is improperly escaped by the gadget.
Philibert on June 12, 2008 1:03 PMPaul, I'm sure I've heard "french" brackets/braces for {} on occasion. I can't say where or when, but it's familiar.
Googling for either of
- "french braces" programming
or
- "french brackets" programming
turns up a scattering of hits, so at least we're not nuts.
Josh Millard on June 12, 2008 1:07 PM)(*!
Bruce Lewin on June 12, 2008 1:12 PMback tick for ` is heavily used here.
tic-tac-to for # has been used as well.
both cases by the non-programmers
eric on June 12, 2008 1:17 PMHas anyone else ever heard { or } called a "Hitchcock"? I have heard that a few times.
Tom on June 13, 2008 2:24 AMwow, what a worthless post.
Jim Ryan on June 13, 2008 3:06 AM@Nathan: Great example of what I suggest should be avoided: shift+6 on a US keyboard might give a ^ (carat, up-arrow), but on mine (Swedish) you'd get a .
@Yves: 'Circumflex' is indeed English for the French 'circonflex'.
And there are plenty of examples above of how confusing it can be to describe a character by its function in a specific language, unless you're absolutely certain that the listener understands that particular context.
By the way, no one has mentioned the (shift+4 on a Swedish keyboard), which I have heard described as a general currency symbol, but no brief or amusing name yet...
DavidR on June 13, 2008 3:10 AMNew Zealand newsreaders used to have an annoying habit of calling double quotation marks "inverted commas".
Not sure if they still do it, since I refuse to watch the news here anymore.
Sean on June 13, 2008 3:25 AM@Jim -- yeah, well, octothorpe you, man!
Jeff Atwood on June 13, 2008 3:38 AMI call '' or '' as 'waka waka.' i think i first saw that on hak.5
Mark on June 13, 2008 3:52 AMOn a Univac 1108 mainframe circa 1972, the two character key combination $! typed at the operator's console caused an instant halt of the entire system. This was referred to as a "dollar-bang" and could be used as a noun or a verb. Also, some Univac system analysts at the time often spoke of * as "dead fly".
dg on June 13, 2008 4:00 AMI don't know where the idea that ` being called a backtick is "rare" came from. The entire perl community calls that a backtick, as does the official documentation. I would say that's one of the most common names, since I've never heard it called anything else.
"circumflex"?
Though I haven't been a native French speaker for 30 years, I would swear we called that (essential) part of French writing the "circonflex".
Nnn... nope, linguistically that's the correct name for it. Welcome to unfortunate language drift ;)
Also:
= 'equals'
== 'is'
!= 'is not' or 'not equals'
= 'fat comma' (in perl, this is interchangeable with the simple comma, except that it has higher precedence)
In the UK:-
() - brackets
[] - square brackets
{} - curly brackets
Wrong, wrong, a thousand times wrong. These terminologies only stem from the systematic extraction of knowledge from the populace by government education schemes. These () have always been parentheses (from Greek parens, around, thesis, idea); these [] have always been brackets; these {} have always been braces (although the brace has seen a much bigger rise in usage since the computer, as they were originally mainly used on paper to group several lines, and as such were rarely seen as a single character on a single line).
In fact, calling a comma a cedilla is also wrong. What's going on there? The two look completely different. And while I'm ranting, why isn't "question" listed for "question mark" if "at" is listed for "at sign"? And I've heard these called chevrons before...
Al on June 13, 2008 4:12 AMI agree with your list on most of the characters. However, I come from the Netherlands, and almost any (programmer) I know calls the $ a "string", not a dollar sign.
Other characters in Dutch:
^ Dakje (roof)
# Hekje (fence)
@ Apenstaartje (monkey tail - though almost any programmer will say "at")
_ Liggend streepje (lying bar)
/ and \: schuine streep (slanted line) - however my typing teacher called it a "schrap" which means as much as "delete" (Scrhap and left schrap)
By the way, you must be very food-centered with your Crunch (#), Pretzel (), grapes (%) and the strudel (@).
Also, I agree that most people don't know the correct name for the tilde (~)
Tijmen / IIVQ on June 13, 2008 4:22 AMYou left out "reverse solidus" for the "backslash", the Unicode nomenclature for the character.
ReallyEvilCanine on June 13, 2008 4:40 AMIn Romanian language the @ sign is often called "a-rond" or monkeytail.
Also I was much amused to hear the # sign being called "the prison sign" :))
Andrei Rinea on June 13, 2008 4:41 AMbeing from Argentina, I can tell you how we call those symbols in spanish:
! = "admiracin"
" = "comillas"
# = "numeral"
$ = "pesos"
% = "por ciento"
= "and, or ampersand" ( this one seems not to have a spanish translation )
' = "apstrofe"
() = "parntesis"
[] = "corchetes"
{} = "llaves"
= "menor, mayor"
* = "asterisco"
- = "guin, or menos"
_ = "guin bajo"
/ = "barra"
\ = "barra invertida, or contrabarra"
: = "dos puntos"
; = "punto y coma"
? = "pregunta"
@ = "arroba"
| = "pipe" ( correctly pronounced in english)
` = "comillas" (which causes confusion with the other "comillas")
~ = "uflo"
Just thougth it was funny to share.
Some of the house-translations we make here are pretty weird, also. For example, as Linux users, me and my colleages call the ` as "comillas de ejecucin" (execution quote).
TaTooKa on June 13, 2008 4:45 AMIn spanish @ is also calles 'ensaimada' : http://images.google.com/images?q=ensaimadaie=UTF-8oe=utf-8rls=org.mozilla:es-ES:officialclient=firefox-aum=1sa=Ntab=wi
PacoLinux on June 13, 2008 4:47 AMHash (#) is also commonly known as Gate.... well at least by the guys I know that work in Telecommunications.
BD on June 13, 2008 4:49 AMIn a similar vein, I knew a Mac programmer (female) who called the Command key on the Mac a "puppy paw". I tried not to snicker when she said it out loud...
Dave Rodenbaugh on June 13, 2008 4:51 AM"Jesper: You mean, most English cultures. We ofcourse have our own words for all these characters in our own languages."
Ofcourse that was more about the pronunciation rules we have learnt for them while learning english. And I think that "international" use is a better measure to learn common pronunciation for these words, rather than letting the brits and the americans argue about it. :)
So here's a list as I have learnt these from browsing through the great internet:
~ : Tilde
@ : At-sign
. : Dot or period. Never heard of "full stop" before.
! : Exclamation mark. Again, never heard of "bang".
# : Not sure, probably hash. Definitely not pound.
(): Parantheses
[]: Square brackets
{}: Curly braces/brackets
' : Single quote
" : Quotation marks
_ : Underline
In the telecoms world, # is sometimes referred to as "gate"
Bob Moore on June 13, 2008 5:00 AMSorry, there's proper ways in English to say something, and then there's the brain damaged way.
() is parenthesis
[] is bracket
{} is curly brace
^ is caret
Follow these rules or I'll recommend to the boss not to hire immigrants.
... on June 13, 2008 5:01 AMBiggest source of confusion that I see is that when I say "braces", people don't realize I mean { }. I think they seem to want to hear "curly bracket" or "curly braces"
Also, I tend to refer to an asterisk * as a "Kleene". But I do all say star or asterisk commonly.
TM on June 13, 2008 5:14 AMI've heard '~' pronounced as squidge, especially in relation to peoples home directories, or websites.
Peter Russell on June 13, 2008 5:20 AMA lot of these aren't really alternative names, just the name of the operation which the symbol means in a particular context. For example a '%' is a percentage sign or whatever slang term you want. When used in this context :
int x = a % b;
it's called 'modulus' or 'mod'. If someones uses the sentence 'Int X equals a percentage sign b' to describe this line of code doesn't know what they are talking about.
Brendan Donegan on June 13, 2008 5:49 AMHas this post been stroke full stopped yet?
Patrick McElhaney on June 13, 2008 5:49 AMJust as point of reference there are other currencies than the $ like in the UK we have the (pound) this is shown above the number 3. So using "pound key" for the # key seems like a jolly smashing idea chappy.
Prince of Wales on June 13, 2008 6:40 AMFor the person who asked about which keyboard featured the mysterious and symbols –they seem to be standard issue on English language Mac keyboards. But I still have no idea what they are used for. I guess they would make a good delimiter, as they don't seem to crop up much in normal usage.
As an aside, French Mac keyboards seem to have been designed with the assumption that nobody will ever try to use them to do any coding. The various flavours of brackets are tucked away in bizarre places and the pipe character seems to only be accessible via 3-key combinations that I have to look up on Google! I think I did find the backtick the other day, but I was hunting for something else at the time.
Matthew on June 13, 2008 6:46 AM"Periods are (almost) always called full stops in Enlgand" - mike
I think it's crazy that Wikipedia doesn't even call it "period"! Check this out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Period
Wikipedia calls it "full stop"!
Josh on June 13, 2008 6:55 AM= can't be "arrow", because - is "arrow"
Billkamm on June 13, 2008 7:15 AMThe "@" is also known as the asperand.
#| - hash pipe
= (a la lambda) - 'goesta'
To a typographer, the typewriter quotation mark " is a dumb quote. The currency symbol is called a louse or sputnik, but it's only a working placeholder when setting type in a font which lacks whatever local currency symbol.
Many Canadians are somewhat conscious of the French language, so a comma would never be mistakenly called a cedilla. Unicode actually has a stand-alone cedilla () but I suppose I just used it for the first time ever in this comment.
Canadians use (round) brackets and square brackets, like Brits do, although “parentheses” is seen more thanks to North American office culture. Likewise, many telephone voicemail systems now ask us to press the “pound sign,” even though my old mechanical typewriter had both # and .
The octothorp # is "eight fields" around the common pasture, and represents a village in cartography. The "quadrathorp(e)" = actually has three fields, so I'm guessing that it and "bithorp(e)" - must be back-formations from the mistaken assumption that a thorp is the terminal end of a stroke.
@Sacha, (“plus or minus”) is used to indicate a range, as in “60 10,” meaning 50 to 70. is the section sign, which goes with the pilcrow , or paragraph sign. It is used as a divider, and both are also sometimes used to mark footnotes, instead of raised numbers, along with the symbols * † ‡ #8214; .
Most of this predates computers, and isn't used in a context where only ASCII has traditionally been available.
Michael Zed on June 13, 2008 7:24 AMFor those who wonder about the usage of '' and '':
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_sign
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plus-minus_sign
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rautenzeichen
this page is about the '#' sign - and it links
to the following page by Axel Beckert who at
his time as a student had been collecting
words for symbols:
http://fsinfo.cs.uni-sb.de/~abe/Bloedsinn/Teppich.html
enjoy! :)
--Sven
Sven Guckes on June 13, 2008 7:35 AMWhy is "back tick" in the rare column?
It's probably the most commonly used word for this thing: `
Bob on June 13, 2008 8:19 AMIt's interesting doing programming in australia. Im currently doing a programming course at univesity and the Lecturer uses the correct Australian names, but us students us an all manner of different and wide ranging names. It can get quite confusing. I usually just call things "That squiggly thing there" or something similar.
Reece on June 13, 2008 8:25 AM@ = at the rate of
A on June 13, 2008 8:51 AMYou can't forget ....
{} - Chicken Lips
davide on June 13, 2008 9:01 AM
{ Bob Hope Left (aka. Mr Bob Hope's profile looking left)
} Bob Hope Right (aka. Mr Bob Hope's profile looking right)
For those youngster, here's Bob: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Hope
Just remember that DWORD rhymes with SWORD, and you'll be okay...
JFred on June 13, 2008 9:39 AM"
You must not be an embedded designer. We use it all the time to invert bits. Very useful for masking all but certain bits in a byte.
e.g.
#define ENABLE_BIT 0x02
x = register ~ENABLE_BIT;
This will mask out all the bits except the Enable bit of "register".
"
We usually write that as
ENABLE_BIT : constant Integer = 2#0000_0010#;
x := Register and not ENABLE_BIT;
or even easier (given a corresponding type declaration):
x := not Register.Enable_Bit;
Not much use for eccentric characters there, although I just showed one of the very few, so actually I don't give a sh** what you call those. :P
When I have to read out C-like-source loudely, this more sounds like this: "blabla this damn special char - you know which - bla bla - another special char - ..." if the code makes a bit of sense, there's even less ambiguity than one might think. ;)
Vinzent Hoefler on June 13, 2008 9:48 AM^@.@*
}"_# |
-@$/_%
!( @|=
;`+$?^?
,#"~|)^G
hat less at less point at star
backbrace double base pound space bar
dash at cash and slash base rate
wow open tab at bar is great
semi backquote plus cash huh DEL
comma pound double tilde bar close BEL
In brazilian portuguese:
! exclamao (ponto de exclamao)
" aspas
# sustenido, jogo-da-velha (tic-tac-toe), grade (grid)
$ cifro, dlar
% por cento, percentual
"e" comercial
' apstrofo, aspas simples
() parnteses
[] colchetes
{} chaves
menor, maior
* asterisco
+ mais
, vrgula
- menos, hfen
. ponto
/ barra
\ contra barra
: dois pontos (two dots :S)
; ponto-e-vrgula
= igual
? interrogao (ponto de interrogao)
@ arroba
^ acento circunflexo
_ I actually call it "underline" or "underscore"...
` crase
| barra vertical, "pipe"
~ til
@JFred:
"Just remember that DWORD rhymes with SWORD, and you'll be okay..."
Amen, brother! And "char" is homophonic with what you do to steaks if you leave them too long on the grill.
@Vinzent Hoefler:
"ENABLE_BIT : constant Integer = 2#0000_0010#;
x := Register and not ENABLE_BIT;"
Just because you're writing embedded code doesn't mean you have to introduce portability concerns unnecessarily. What happens when you want to use the same code with a CPU that's differently endian?
Alex Chamberlain on June 13, 2008 10:08 AM# = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundpole_fence
Norwegian: Skigard
:)
tan on June 13, 2008 10:23 AMSometimes pronunciations are context specific:
e.g.
"x y" would be "x is less than y"
where
"some sort of markup/" would be "left angle bracket, some sort of markup, forward slash, right angle bracket"
"@Vinzent Hoefler:
"ENABLE_BIT : constant Integer = 2#0000_0010#;
x := Register and not ENABLE_BIT;"
Just because you're writing embedded code doesn't mean you have to introduce portability concerns unnecessarily. What happens when you want to use the same code with a CPU that's differently endian?
Alex Chamberlain on June 13, 2008 09:08 AM
"
There is no portability issue. I'd get the same compile error, no matter of the compiler's target. ;)
Vinzent Hoefler on June 13, 2008 10:36 AMI'm from a C+ background, not perl, and I call - arrow. I think I came up with that on my own, perhaps I picked it up from someone who had programmed in perl.
i have never heard ` called grave but that will be my new term for the backquote. Backquote is just too darn much of a mouthfull.
My favorite for "" is floppy bunny ears, which one of my non-programming friends came up with. It always makes me laugh when I hear that one.
In swedish # can be "lumber yard" (brdgrd) or "woodpile" (vedstapel).
Gustav on June 13, 2008 11:07 AMwax/wane
iirc, wax means "to get more", while wane is "to get less".
the phase of the moon is usually referred to by these words.
the problem is that in the northern hemisphere (where most humans live, sorry you three :P ) when the moon is waxing (new) it looks like this )
its easy to remember, when it's born it looks like the bottom part of a 'b', and when it's dieing it looks like the bottom part of a 'd'.
i suggest muddying the water further and defining ( = wane, ) = wax
so that "wax bang at hash buck grapes circumflex and splat wane" is )!@$%^*(
o_O
yossi on June 13, 2008 11:45 AMcan also be pronounced as "boy fishing" (since that's what it looks like).
John-Paul Gignac on June 13, 2008 12:21 PMI always liked the name a coworker gave the ! key. He called it "damn it", but usually in context to vi as in q! (quit damn it).
Sean on June 13, 2008 12:27 PMi gotta tell you whoever calls the double quotes 'dieresis' is out of his mind, and probably haven't exposed to spanish or german.
draco on June 13, 2008 12:29 PMI saw $ called "bling" somewhere. I was like, man, that's tight.
Patrick McElhaney on June 13, 2008 12:33 PMI've had this conversation before. The carat is not the same thing as the circumflex.
Here's a carat:^
Here's a circumflex: ˆ
still can't see the difference? Here's a few side by side: ^ˆ^ˆ^ˆ^ˆ^ˆ^ˆ^ˆ^ˆ
Skunkwaffle on June 13, 2008 12:42 PMI work at a PHP shop where there are lots of $ floating around:
$ - Bling
Gosherm on June 13, 2008 12:49 PMI'd like to nominate the following for standardization:
! bang
" rabbit ears
? hunchback
% grapes
pretzel
@ vortex
* splat
and new additions
~ worm
_ dead worm
$ bling
| calista flockhart
/ leaning tower of pisa
\ rigor mortis
For "t = t.Name", I would say "tee implies tee dot name"
Les Baker on June 13, 2008 1:09 PMAll you have to do is visit the Unicode Consortium web page
to find a formal definition that is Universally applicable (that means outside the states as well as inside).
Your pound key would confuse with Ux20A4 Lira sign and UxA3, pound sign
Dave P on June 13, 2008 1:10 PMSome Danish translations
# garden gate (havelge)
" goose eyes (gsejne)
@ elephant trunk A (snabel-a)
In norwegian, we often refer to the dot "." and "-" in the context of class/object members as 'sin' wich is the 'his genetive' ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_genitive ).
"window.document.height()" becomes "window sin document sin height()"
wich rougly translates to
"the window's document's height"
It sounds slightly awkward since we're mixing english and norwegian, but it quite accurately describes the intention indepent of actual syntax.
Jeff: "...most other cultures know it as the hash key."
You mean, most English cultures. We ofcourse have our own words for all these characters in our own languages. Some examples of how I call these characters in Dutch:
# - hekje (little fence)
{ } - accolade openen / accolade sluiten (opening accolade / closing accolade); I guess that's a French word
: - dubbele punt (double point)
; - puntkomma (point comma)
@ - apenstaartje (monkey's tail)
^ - dakje (little roof)
What on earth makes you think that writing a blog full time qualifies you to write about programming? Guess what: IT DOESN'T. I know three people who are more qualified to write about programming simply because THEY STILL DO IT FOR A LIVING.
David on June 14, 2008 2:10 AMAhh, the age-old # = pound, number, hash, octothorpe, sharp, etc debate.
I believe the definitive answer is "anything *but* pound". You Americans only call it pound because it's in the same place as the *actual* pound () key on the GB keyboard layout :)
Mark on June 14, 2008 5:05 AMA friend of mine from South Africa calls ':' "double dot" and ';' "comma dot"; it was pretty funny the first time he said "you forget the comma dot at the end of your line there."
Dennis on June 14, 2008 5:36 AM@ in russian is "sobaka" (#1089;#1086;#1073;#1072;#1082;#1072;), which means... a dog
ValkaTR on June 14, 2008 6:59 AMIn the Navy, we always called the dash - a "tac"
Compartments (rooms) on a ship are labelled like: 6-150-3-E
It's pronounced 'six tac one-fifty tac three tac E' and it means that the compartment is 5 decks below the main deck, starts at the 150th frame aft of the bow, is the second space out from the centerline on the starboard side, and is an engineering space.
Jarin Udom on June 14, 2008 7:38 AMDon't forget "backticks", Jeff :)
Greg Magarshak on June 14, 2008 7:40 AMhell, I can't comment here :(
Omar Abid on June 14, 2008 8:09 AMI don't want to get circumflexed! That's a caret...fo sho fo sho
gotta love assKey!
Joe Beam on June 14, 2008 8:46 AMsheez I can't say a-s-s-key???
Joe Beam on June 14, 2008 8:46 AMYou forgot the best one for '\' (backslash)... "OJ Simpson".
-mdb
MDB on June 14, 2008 11:49 AMFor a reference, I live in Japan and people pronounce these signs as follows (only from my observations):
!: bikkuri mark
": nijyu in-yohu
#: sharp
$: dol mark
%: percent
: and
': apostrophe, in-yohu
( ): kakko / kakko-tojiru
[ ]: chu-kakko / chu-kakko-tojiru
{ }: dai-kakko / dai-kakko-tojiru
: syo-nari / dai-nari
*: asterisk
+: plus, tasu
,: comma
-: dash, boh, hyphen, mainasu
.: period, ten, dot
/: slash
\: backslash, gyaku-slash
:: colon
;: semicolon
=: tohgoh, equal (not "equals")
?: question mark, hatena, gimon-hu
@: at
^: caret, yamagata-kigoh, hat
_: underline, underscore, kasen
`: grave, backquote
|: bar, boh, pipe
~: tilde, nyoro
() cowboys
David on June 14, 2008 1:44 PM"Why isn't it possible anymore to enter characters
by pressing "Alt GR" and the numeric ASCII code into
the numpad?"
Isn't it Alt not Alt GR?
[ICR] on June 15, 2008 4:23 AM$ is normally pronounced "euro". As distinct from €, pronounced Euro.
moz on June 15, 2008 8:29 AMComma ',' isn't cedilla, which symbol is different.
cedilla = ''- 'c'
if # is most commonly called hash, then why is c# not called cee-hash...microsoft thats bloody why.
I still call it c-hash, who's with me?
bob on June 16, 2008 2:27 AMI've always used/said = as 'therefore'
Doofus on June 16, 2008 2:27 AMI want to know which madman thought C# was a good name for a language?
I know lets pick a character that everyone mistakes for another #9839;- #
that everyone in the world calls a different name, and no-one can agree on a name for, and there has been a long running debate about what it is called, oh and make sure you can't search for it in any search engine!
Some of those are mathamatical functions, not names for the symbol.
Factorial is denoted as !, but that doesnt mean the ! symbol is called factorial
For those not mathematically minded, a factorial is a multiple of all preceding integers including the input value (ie !3 = 3x2x1 = 6, !4 = 4x3x2x1 = 24)
To the guy who wonders about ~ (the tilde) and who thinks it is rarely used.
In most Unix shells this character gets expanded to the value of the environment variable $HOME which contains the path to the current users home directory.
Thus ~/somefile is shorthand for /home/currentuser/somefile
It is also the default escape character in the secure shell ssh - pressing it terminates the connection.
In Perl it is part of the "contains" operator as in
$var = untrusted_user_input;
if($var =~ regex;){
sanitize input ...;
}
and there it is used extensively. I would wager that you find it in nearly 90% of all Perl-based CGI scripts that handle input from forms.
To the chap who enquired as to . In German legalese this is shorthand for "paragraph" = section of law.
As to its presence on the Mac keyboard. Toggle "show invisibles" in AppleWorks and you will see that the app uses it internally as a section delimiter eq to LaTex \section{} directive.
About C#: One would assume that the monicker was borrowed from musicspeak, where you would pronounce it "C-sharp" as in "pitch up by half-tone".
Bernhard on June 16, 2008 4:11 AM@bart: "I like how in choosing between harboring mild anti-American sentiments or, say, doing a Google search, you chose the former. :)"
Oh well, we'll just have to fall back on aluminum, check, diaper, fanny-pack(!), garbage, replacing large numbers of 's's with 'z's etc.
The explanation of '#' as pound sign you give, also merely shifts the idiosyncrasy from the choice of the term, to the adoption of an archaic italian printers symbol (which is then generally not used by Americans anyway).
Si on June 16, 2008 4:40 AMAfter reading up a bit on typography (http://www.creativepro.com/article/typographic-tips-apostrophes-quotation-marks is an excellent article) you can see that neither ", ' nor ` are actual quote characters.
Victor Engmark on June 16, 2008 6:19 AM"A friend of mine from South Africa calls ':' "double dot" and ';' "comma dot""
In french ":" is "two-dots" and ";" is "dot-comma".
Literally, official names.
Isn't "/" a _whack_ (over the head) and "\" a _kick_ (in the shins)?
Quarterback16 on June 16, 2008 8:42 AMon my french canadian keyboard the "cdille()" has a specific key and the "virgule(comma)" has another specific key. I don't know about the french one because I've never seen an azerty keyboard. There are a lot of differances on how to say those characters here
in Qubec French
! point d'exclamation
" Double guillemets (although is called guillemets too)
# dise
$ signe de dollar
% pourcent
"e" comercial (read as et)
' apostrophe
() parantheses
[] crochets
{}
plus petit, plus grand (literally lower, greater)
* asterisque
+ plus
, virgule
- tiret
. point
/ barre oblique
\ barre oblique inverse
: deux points
; point virgule
= gal
? point d'interogation
@ arrobas (also a comercial)
^ accent circonflex
_ underscore (never heard anything else in french)
` accent aigu
| barre
~ tilde
I think some people who know that backslashes are somehow related to computers so they figure the double slash in a URL (which is they ever get closest they get to computer code) must be a backslash. When, of course it's a "forward" slash--thus the confusion.
What purpose does the backslash purpose serve, anyway? It's the path separator in Windows, of course, but you can't use a regular slash in file names, and lots of Windows programs will take either as the separator. Most of the above have origins in pre-digital typesetting, but I can't think of a non-computer use for a backslash.
The comments to this entry are closed.
Subscribe in a reader
Subscribe via email
|
|
Traffic Stats |