Thursday, June 12, 2008

!#@ = (Bang Octothorpe Strudel)

ASCII Pronunciation Rules. [Link]

As programmers, we deal with a lot of unusual keyboard characters that typical users rarely need to type, much less think about:

$ # % {} * [] ~ & <>

Even the characters that are fairly regularly used in everyday writing -- such as the humble dash, parens, period, and question mark -- have radically different meaning in programming languages.

This is all well and good, but you'll eventually have to read code out loud to another developer for some reason. And then you're in an awkward position, indeed.

How do you pronounce these unusual ASCII characters?

!#@. I actually would pronounce this as 'not', 'pound', 'at', but bang octothorpe strudel is better.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I would pronounce that as "bad perl."

Jeff said...

Isn't it all? I only worked with perl in the early 90's for a while. Very powerful, but hard to write clean.
That's not true entirely, there are just so many ways to do something that you can't see the right way amongst all the other ways.

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