/ uphill \ downhill
/ divide(d( by))
Conflating hyphens and dashes really bothers me. There are very few true dashes in programming contexts. They’re mostly hyphens and subtraction operators.
But I’m a writer in addition to a programmer, so I need to keep these concepts distinct.
I’ve recently been trying to figure out which ASCII symbol is most overloaded. It’s either ’ or -.
I remember “@” being called pig-tail early in my experience as a touch-typist.
I also know of “” being pronounced “lambda” because it was the available printer character for that (leading to the name Pound-Sterling-calculus).
The same functional programming Brits also enjoyed referring to bras and kets. That is, “(” is a bra, “)” is its ket. Don’t recall how (, [, and [ were differentiated.
\ downright
\ upleft
/ downleft
/ upright
I once had an IT instructor from the South who read “*” as “spuh-LAY-it”.
Reminds me of the Victor Borge ‘Phonetic punctuation’ sketch, in which he reads a story with all the commas, fullstops, dashes, etc pronounced…
Anyone else here old enough to remember that?
I work for a multinational company, so I believe it’s important to use terms understood by everyone, and also not to refer to keyboard positions.
As a multilingual programmer, I also prefer the language-neutral terms rather than ‘pointer’, ‘not’, etc.
yeh i go with back tick for `
and whack for /
and when thinking in XML, for “”, “” and “/” I use “blond”, “brunette”, “redhead”.
Aren’t “french quotes” those little chevron like characters correctly called Guillemets (or sometimes ‘duck feet’).
They’re used in ML and F# for quoting code.
I find it interesting that there are so many different names for the same symbols. I’ll definitely be paying closer attention to which terms the people around me are using. =]
Hello!
Why isn’t it possible anymore to enter characters
by pressing “Alt GR” and the numeric ASCII code into
the numpad?
Was that a feature of good old MS-DOS or of old keyboards?
So instead of saying “backslash” you say “Alt-GR 134” (octal)
or “Alt-Gr 92” (decimal).
(Can anyone remember if this system was decimal
or octal based?).
Erik
WOW! The splat ("*")…
I was sure close.
When I cut my eye-teeth on a teletype terminal, I called it SPLOT.
…that’s what it sounded like to me
I just use the ASCII values instead of names. Saves time and reduces ambiguity. Doesn’t everybody do that?
Inspiring. I will now only refer to quotes as “dirks”. (Two spot - wane)
My colleagues use “drop” for \ and /. I soooo hate that
Erik: it still works, with both Alt keys (well, not in some keyboard layouts). And it’s decimal.
Good topic. And fundamental to communicating programming syntax.
In conversations, we were always mixing up - [] {}. We came to this resolution: brackets have hard corners [], thus the hard “k” sound. Braces have round corners {}, thus the soft sound.
Although, that doesn’t seem to be the end of it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracket
I thought the math/engineering discipline would help, but at www.wolfram.com (makers of Mathematica):
“The rules for using brackets are just as simple. Arguments to Mathematica functions are always enclosed in square brackets [ ]. Lists, matrices, and arrays are always enclosed in curly brackets { }. Matrices and arrays are implemented simply as lists of lists.”
Although the Open Standards Group glossary at
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/7990989775/xbd/glossary.html:
braces::
The characters “{” (left brace) and “}” (right brace), also known as curly braces. When used in the phrase “enclosed in (curly) braces” the symbol “{” immediately precedes the object to be enclosed, and “}” immediately follows it. When describing these characters in the portable character set, the names left-brace and right-brace are used.
brackets::
The characters “[” (left-bracket) and “]” (right-bracket), also known as square brackets. When used in the phrase “enclosed in (square) brackets” the symbol “[” immediately precedes the object to be enclosed, and “]” immediately follows it. When describing these characters in the portable character set, the names left-square-bracket and right-square-bracket are used.
I’ve usually heard the accent grave ` mark pronounced “thorn”.
“Pound Bang User Bin Bash.”
“Whack Whack Host Whack Share Whack Folder Whack Program Dot Bat.”
In the office, I sometimes get strange looks from passers by when talking with my fellows.
~ is clearly a cornflake, that’s what I always call it!
The “@” sign is sometimes called “monkey tail” (“coada de maimuta”) in Romanian.
in mexico we call
= “gato” like cat its the same as tic-tac-toe,
@ = arroba
- = asterisco
$ = pesos
M$ = u know
| = pipe
~ = tilde
Tis one i dont know ^, i call it the “techo” (cieling) like in a house