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Comment by adsche | Hacker News Reader

What I read so far is great, but I noticed this gem about preprocessor directives:

    All the macro comands begin with a hashtag (#).

Do we really call every hash character a hashtag now?! :)

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Welcome to the rolling wave of civilization. Did we really used to call the number sign a "hash character"?

UK & Ireland: Yes, and still do, although it's apparently a corruption of "hatch" (as in cross-hatch).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_sign#Usage_in_the_United...

Vaguely related:

From The Devil's Dictionary (1881-1906) [devil]:

    HASH, x.  There is no definition for this word -- 
    nobody knows what hash is.

Better than calling it the pound symbol. It was always a source of minor confusion, as people used it rarely and had all sorts of different names for it.

No matter what I do, this is what my students call it. hashtag include iostream

You mean the octothorpe character? [1] That symbol seems to go by a lot of names!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_sign

It's a "sharp", hence why #! is often called a "shebang". Tho' I call ! a "pling".

The sharp sign (♯) [1] is actually a different symbol than the number sign (#) [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_%28music%29

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_sign

In Australia (or maybe it was just me?!) we called it "hash" not "sharp"... so #! was "hashbang". The beauty of this system is that #| is "hashpipe", so it _must_ be correct.

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