ASCII Pronunciation Rules for Programmers [2008]
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How is this an improvement?
Maybe call them right-slash and left-slash, with the lean prefix implied? This would probably help our right to left language friends.
[1] http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet.html
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BefungeLet me explain: Assume that the slash begins like a pipe |. If the slash has a hinge at the bottom (like most people intuitively assume), then / is "leaning forward" and \ is "leaning back". However, if, when you look at the slash, you assume the hinge is on the top, then it looks like / is "swinging back" and \ is "swinging forward".
So until I figured out where people were putting the "hinge", "back" and "forward" seemed arbitrary. I know it sounds strange, but it was a great source of confusion for me.
Edit: The phrase "lefty loosey, righty tighty" also confused me until I figured out that "left" and "right" were relative to the direction that the top of the screw/bolt moved, not the bottom.
I tend to use "the slash with the question mark" and then either "the slash near backspace" or "the slash NOT near the question mark", since the backslash keyboard position isn't completely standard.
Of course, these experiences are when dealing with having to have an end user type them in (thank you, internet).
I quickly discovered, right in front of the class at the white board with marker in hand, with my first " { " written, that being fluent in English was NOT the same as being fluent in Spoken Programmer English.
My second realization was that almost nobody in the United Kingdom spoke a dialect of English that I could comprehend, but that's another story.
Bonus info: { } are called commonly called måsvingar/seagull wings in Swedish, which really gave me no hint at all what to call them in English.
In Swedish and Danish the sign is known as the "snabel a" (literally trunk a), owning to the resemblance between the sign and the trunk of an elephant. In Norwegian the term most commonly used is "krøllalfa" (literally: curled alpha). In Greek the sign is known as "papaki" meaning small duck. In Slovenian, the most common word for it is "afna", colloquially meaning "monkey", much like in Polish. In Hungarian, it is called "kukac" meaning "caterpillar".
I think I'm going to start calling it cygnus because it looks like the accretion disk of a black hole.
<> !*''#
^"`$$-
!*=@$_
%*<> ~#4
&[]../
|{,,SYSTEM HALTED
Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat equal at dollar under-score,
Percent splat waka waka tilde number four,
Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma CRASH.
+----+-----------------+-------------+
| | [] | () |
+----+-----------------+-------------+
| US | brackets | parentheses |
| UK | square brackets | brackets |
+----+-----------------+-------------+ | AU | square brackets | parentheses |
+----+-----------------+-------------+
The sibling post's author thinks that ( ) are brackets.
Clearly there are two different populations here. That's why the need to explicitly specify which "brackets".
| CA | [[any of the above]] | [[any of the above]] |
+----+----------------------+----------------------+
| Indiana | square brackets | parentheses |
+---------+-----------------+-------------+
I'm guessing you don't know Perl? I think that's where I learned to call it that.
I just searched quickly how to explain that the semi-colon is somehow half a colon. I couldn't find anything.
I'd like to add that it is wrong to think about commas, semi-colons, etc. in terms of duration of a pause in the speech. These signs articulate written sentences' syntax, and it sometimes relate to pauses when read aloud, but it is not a bijection. When analysing recordings, J. Drillon (Traité de la ponctuation française) showed that the correlation is really weak.
Although, confusingly, I believe the English semicolon functions more similarly to the punctuation associated with a Greek/Latin colon.
Of course, that may be cause it's exactly the same in my native italian.
Leads to some interesting PHP errors, like: Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM
However, there are a couple that, despite the INTERCAL authors' best efforts, have entered common usage, according to the chart: "mesh" and "splat".
Nitpick? Yes. This is HN, after all.
* Some Solaris commands use plus and minus to add and subtract things, but a) everyone hates Solaris commands b) this breaks with convention, hence a).
e.g. "3-74-4-E" would be pronounced "three tac seventy-four tac four tac echo" (3rd deck, 74th frame aft of the bow, 2nd compartment outboard of the centerline on the port side, and it's an engineering space)
I've also avoided calling it a "dash" since I left the Navy, since dashes and hyphens are different characters in typography.
Consequently, I'm always on the look-out for more formal and concise terms where previously I may have used more simplistic language - in this case, 'braces', 'brackets' and 'parentheses' struck me as being the best way to describe {}, [] and (), compared to curly, square and normal brackets (as I've likewise always called them). <> will have to remain angle brackets though I think.
Might as well call it a "WTF mark".
A lot of people think that '\' is the slash and '/' the backslash leading to some confusion among non-programmers (and some escaped characters here and there.)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1181243
Openstache and closestache are two very good names for { and }, primarily because they are shorter.
I usually say "arrow", or "dash-greater-than"... but come to think of it, I very rarely have to ever actually say this.
Other characters are unsafe because gateways and other transport agents are known to sometimes modify such characters. These characters are "{", "}", "|", "\", "^", "~", "[", "]", and "`".
All unsafe characters must always be encoded within a URL.