You’ve got ‘’ listed both as whack and backwhack. IMO ‘’ == whack and ‘/’ == backwhack.
@ is spanish is arroba.
My comp sci teacher in high school called { } “scrollies.”
The symbol wich gives me mmore headaches is the ~ symbol, mostly because no one uses it ever, so no one knows how its called. The easiest way I found to explain it is by using the word “oflo”, which a fellow programmer invented: basically, since no one knows what a oflo is, I don’t have to come up with an esoteric (although correct) name - all i have to do is wait for the “what?” question, and draw the symbol in the air (sometimes I roll my eyes just to make the other guy feel bad for not knowing what a oflo is). It doesn’t work very well on the phone, though.
cool topic!
Talking about pronunciation, today I was talking about some LINQ code and we both wondered, how do you guys read out loud lambda expressions such as “t = t.Name” ?
So if # has ‘pound’ and ‘pound sign’ as common names, what are the common names for ?
In Ruby, the names of methods that return true or false end with a question mark. I like to pronounce it as a Canadian “eh”, so that “empty?” becomes “empty, eh?”
The symbol wich gives me mmore headaches is the ~ symbol
I’ve always heard “tilde” or “squiggle” for this one.
how do you guys read out loud lambda expressions such as “t = t.Name”
Oh man, I don’t even want to go there – there have to be completely different rules for multiple character ASCII sets.
So if # has ‘pound’ and ‘pound sign’ as common names,
I’ve called it ‘pound’ for a long time, but I think I will switch to ‘hash’ from this point on. I guess for a .NET ecosystem developer, I could call it ‘sharp’, as in C# … we may say “csharp” but certainly don’t want to go around saying “coctothorpe” 
Really you should consult a dictionary and find out which is the ‘correct’ answer for each symbol. This may not reflect common usage in the computing industry, but that’s normal for all forms of language.
And saying c-octothorpe to annoy C# devs never loses its shine.
Did you know Microsoft is making a new language to replace C#? Its C$, pronounced “ca-ching”
That’s one (of rather few) things I like about the VB or VB.NET language: You can read it more or less without having to pronounce too many ASCII characters.
What happened to ‘ampersat’ ('tis a common word, round my way).
Or even ‘asperand’
I’d avoid using ‘quotation marks’ to describe the " character as that is a very English-centric term as the table on this page shows:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark,_non-English_usage
I prefer to use ‘double quote’.
Skizz
has always been “number sign” to me.
I think it would be neat to standardize on unambiguous, one-word, preferably one-syllable, names for each character. Bang, quote, hash, square, unsquare, grave, pipe, etc. You would probably want to do the same for certain multi-character ones like = (pointed out above), ==, -, //, …, /*, etc. Unfortunately there’s also context to deal with… ‘.’ may be “period” inside a string but I only hear “dot” everywhere else…
I started playing around with BASIC when I was around six years old on a Vic 20 - due to this early age I didn’t have a clue what the proper names for most of the symbols were so I invented my own. The only one I can remember today was calling a semi-colon a jig.
Why is
1000000.times { puts “Thank You!” }
difficult to spell?
I reckon back tick is common, not rare, certainly in the UNIX/Linux community.
I’ve also heard # referred to as “sh”, in the context #! = “sh-bang”, but now maybe I’ll call it flash bang!
Officially, the - sign on the keyboard is a hyphen/minus. A dash is longer.
@AndyB: “saying c-octothorpe to annoy C# devs never loses its shine.”
True, but it’s not actually correct since the language is “C-Sharp” not “C-Hash”.
The two are distinct symbols. Hash (aka Number Sign, aka Octothorpe) is Unicode U+0023, whereas Sharp is U+266F and typically has sloping horizontal bars on the glyph.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_sign
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_(music)
Paul and Josh,
I’ve never heard { and } referred to as french quotes, but it’s certainly possible. Some Perl documentation calls and French quotes, but of course they’re not ASCII. 