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Comment by Tepix | Hacker News Reader

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.

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'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

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

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