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Comment by simonjgreen | Hacker News Reader

Total tangent, but extremely interested in the use of the Yen/Yuan sign as a footnote marker. Is there some history here I’ve overlooked or is this just arbitrary?

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Haha - i was looking for ¹, ² or § but couldn‘t find them on my german ipad onscreen keyboard, so i improvised.

Interesting that you'd use "Section", "§", as a reference marker. Asterisk (*), and dagger (†) are common reference markers in British English, but not the section sign, aka "silcrow".

Is that a common usage /auf Deutsch/? Such use is listed on the Wikipedia page, but it's a use I don't ever recall having seen before.

I'm wary of using the asterisk in internet forums, or really in almost any textual exchange online these days, because everything tries to parse text as markdown, and I am never sure whether or not my asterisks will get eaten.

Especially on sites like this one, which have no previews.

On HN you just escape as \* to avoid it doing italics, but I agree that using characters that uniformly work is sensible

It's common in some contexts, in particular ¹/²/... is common for footnotes in handwritten and digital texts.

§ is a bit less common but iirc used in some legal texts. It's also easy to use on ANSI German keyboards with shift+3.

I usually do it like this[1], if that helps.

[1]: Borrowing syntax from Markdown.

I learned BASIC programming on a VIC-20, and I typed in so many "A$, B$, C$", for decades thereafter I pronounced "$" as "string" ("A-string, B-string", etc); it got weird as I discussed Perl scripts with coworkers...

Hah, I did this as well but on a TI-99-4A. Stopped a long time ago but yes var$ would have been pronounced var-string, even in context of later gwbasic, qbasic etc.

So many memories just flooded my brain of using § for Minecraft Pocket edition...

you have tp hold a key longer and then there it is. i think it was „s“

Typing this from a German iPad keyboard. It’s the ampersand key (& → §).

oh interesting, using "section" as footnote marker is more alien to me than using yen

I've not seen it used this way before but it is similar enough to the dagger and double-dagger symbols that the intent to use it as a footnote marker is clear.

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