ASCII Pronunciation Rules for Programmers | Hacker News Reader

ASCII Pronunciation Rules for Programmers

codinghorror.com

19 pointsDanHulton10 comments

This is just about the coolest post I've seen in a while. I use a pretty wide spectrum of these (and had no clue that "tick" and "back-tick" were only rarely used). I just wish I had this when I wrote my punctuation limerick (http://www.limerickdb.com/?418).

Open articleView on HN

I present to you, the best of the best...

$ - Big Money

% - Double-O-Seven

& - Pretzel

{} - Left Squirrely, Right Squirrely

; - Weenie

# - Pigpen

Anybody work in a startup using solely the above vocabulary? Power to you.

The INTERCAL manual had some of the best. I was surprised to see that -- according to the Jargon file ASCII entry -- several of the INTERCAL pronunciations have slipped into what ESR considers common use, e.g. "mesh" and "splat".

Slow news day?

I always called < right alligator and > left alligator.

That confused the hell out of me in first grade. They were trying to get us to understand comparisons, so they told us to pretend the symbols were alligators, and they wanted to eat the most hamburgers. But I only saw them as arrows, so I thought they wanted us to point to the highest number. I got every single one of those problems wrong!

I learned them because I started programming BASIC when I was 5. (I've recovered, thanks for asking.) I had it down pat, and then I was taught the mouth mnemonic in elementary school, and for some reason for weeks after that I had a hard time remembering which was which.

My first C++ instructor compared operator<< and operator>> to eating and vomiting. I am having trouble reconstructing how the analogy worked though.

Cute story: when my dad would read me program from Family Computing magazine to type into my C=64, he would always pronounce the ':' as 'dit-dit' (spoken quickly).

{ } have always been chicken lips to me. Everyone I've said that too has understood and although I may have gotten some strange looks, I've never been corrected.

My favorite pair up, which I learned at Microsoft, is "slash and whack" for '/ and \'.

Killer is trying to remember which is which, but it sounds awesome.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com