Symbol pronunciation (Re: awk comments)

[Victor Gavin]

In article <3896 at dali> icsu7039 at attila.cs.montana.edu (Spannring) writes:
>>In article <6188 at flint4.UUCP>, tang at motcid.UUCP (Sam D. Tang) writes:
>> How does one add comments to an awk program?
>You use the pound sign (#) for a comment.

This hasn't been mentioned for a while so thought I'd resurrect it.

The # has several ``names''. Octothorpe, pound, mesh, hash are just a few.

Octothorpe was invented by AT&T so we can ignore that.

Pound is an Americanism, which doesn't exist anywhere else. For
example in the UK, if you mentioned a pound sign, people would expect
that you meant the UK currency symbol (a fancy L with a dash through
it).

Mesh is a silly invention, used in the same vein as rabbit ears for
double quotes (").

The only name for # that most everyone understands is hash -- or then
again maybe it depends on how you were brought up :-)

The naming of symbols is probably a religious issue (like the
pronunciation of char: is it the base of the word `character' or
is it like the word char, as in lightly burn a something).


I now return you to our normal program...

		vic
--
Victor Gavin <vic at grep.co.uk||..!ukc!grep!vic||..!ukc!vision!grep!vic>