Re: Naes of ASCII Symbols
> Kathy wrote > >Incidentally, EVERYONE I know refers to # as "pound sign". (I'm > referring > >to another thread I saw in this newsgroup.) Programmers, teachers, > >retirees. I only heard someone call it "octothorpe" once, and that guy > was > >kidding around. Once every blue moon I hear it called "hash sign". This is presumably just a British phenomenon, but one connection between the # symbol and "pound sign" comes from printing. In the early '80s computer word processors weren't as WYSIWYG and the on-screen display didn't always match what was printed on the paper. A notable example was the pound sign. If you wanted to see a pound sign on the paper, you had to type a # on the screen, rather than a pound sign. I've a vague feeling this was due to the printers being American (or at least not British) in origin, hence they didn't know what a pound sign was. The solution (and this is more speculation than memory) was to reprogram a little-used(?) character, the hash, to print as a pound sign. Paul Wilkins wrote: > But isn't the pound sign that weird looking symbol the English use for > denoting money? Just how we use $ as a dollar sign? Yep. It can also appear as several slightly different weird squiggles to make things more interesting. MattLB
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X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: f996b,d8ba9ee032dffd44 X-Google-Attributes: gidf996b,public X-Google-Thread: 102ffd,2e58d5f13e65ed35 X-Google-Attributes: gid102ffd,public X-Google-Thread: 113841,2e58d5f13e65ed35 X-Google-Attributes: gid113841,public From: MattLB <mlb...@ZZZukc.ac.uk> Subject: Re: Naes of ASCII Symbols Date: 1998/01/13 Message-ID: <34B...@ZZZukc.ac.uk>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 315650270 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <34A...@ares.informatik.uni-ulm.de><01bd187e$68352060$LocalHost@atkins> <696gls$p0...@clarknet.clark.net><Pfz...@sambo.demon.co.uk> <34B...@on.spammer> <EUX...@xemu.demon.co.uk> <01bd1fc5$f180a440$LocalHost@wzngemxl> <69gh0s$d9l$1...@wolfman.xtra.co.nz> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Organization: University of Kent at Canterbury Newsgroups: alt.ascii-art,alt.usage.english,alt.english.usage
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