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ASCII Pronunciation Rules for Programmers [2008]
- realugglan 16y agoAround ten years ago I worked as an instructor teaching people programming here in Sweden. My company decided I did such a good job they would send me over to their parent company in the UK to teach some classes there. I knew the material by heart so, no problem, I thought. I quickly discovered, right in front of the class at the white board with marker in hand, with my first " { " written, that being fluent in English was NOT the same as being fluent in Spoken Programmer English. My second realization was that almost nobody in the United Kingdom spoke a dialect of English that I could comprehend, but that's another story. Bonus info: { } are called commonly called måsvingar/seagull wings in Swedish, which really gave me no hint at all what to call them in English.
- mryall 16y agoSwedish also has a funny name for the @-sign, named after the trunk of an elephant. In fact, quite a few languages do. Here's a short sample from the Wikipedia article: In Swedish and Danish the sign is known as the "snabel a" (literally trunk a), owning to the resemblance between the sign and the trunk of an elephant. In Norwegian the term most commonly used is "krøllalfa" (literally: curled alpha). In Greek the sign is known as "papaki" meaning small duck. In Slovenian, the most common word for it is "afna", colloquially meaning "monkey", much like in Polish. In Hungarian, it is called "kukac" meaning "caterpillar". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sign#Names http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sign#Names
- kilian 16y agoAnd in the Netherlands, we call it a ape's tail (we use 'ape' both for monkeys and ape's.)
- ajarmoniuk 16y agoIn Poland it's very often simply called "ape" (often giving e-mail addresses), before I often heard "elephant's ear".
- Derbasti 16y agoSome people in Germany call it 'Klammeraffe', which would roughly translate as 'an ape that clings to something' or 'spider monkey'.
- ciupicri 16y agoAnd also in Romania.
- berkes 16y agoWitch makes overheard conversations quite weird, since apenstaart is quite a long word: «yea, that is em-dot-dee-ee-vee-ar-eye-ee-es monkeytail hotmail-dot-com»
- ch0wn 16y agoNo reference to {} as mustaches? Three years are a long time.
- danparsonson 16y agoI've always called them 'curly brackets' which, on reflection, is a little like calling a keyboard a 'typey box'. Funny how long you can do something without really questioning what you're doing!
- sp332 16y agoI call them curly brackets {} to distinguish from square brackets [] and angle brackets <>.
- danparsonson 16y agoI'm a self-taught coder with no formal CS training, and as such have found over recent years that I've been lacking (among other things) some of the appropriate vocabulary to talk about programming unambiguously. Consequently, I'm always on the look-out for more formal and concise terms where previously I may have used more simplistic language - in this case, 'braces', 'brackets' and 'parentheses' struck me as being the best way to describe {}, [] and (), compared to curly, square and normal brackets (as I've likewise always called them). <> will have to remain angle brackets though I think.
- kami8845 16y agoThis is a blessing for, I imagine, everyone who has learnt computer programming in a non-English-speaking country.
- zorked 16y ago` as backtick is rare? I thought it was the standard.
- magicofpi 16y agoWhere are you from? I've actually never heard it before (in the US).
- hesselink 16y agoThis is the only name for it I've heard here in the Netherlands.
- Natsu 16y agoYeah, I thought backtick was pretty normal myself and I'm from the US. I'm guessing you don't know Perl? I think that's where I learned to call it that.
- _delirium 16y agoI'm from the US, but I think I know it almost exclusively from Unix shell scripts and Perl documentation, where `foo` is called the "backtick operator".
- michaelcampbell 16y agoYes, I think it could be your (our) tech context more than geographical; I came up through the unix and perl worlds and am in the US, and have ONLY ever seen that as 'backtick'.
- jazzyb 16y agoI've always heard it called that myself, but it's usually shortened to just "tick" where I work now.
- davvid 16y agoHe should have also listed "#!" AKA "shebang" / "hashbang"
- dansingerman 16y agoFor "hashbang" you can directly derive it from # ("hash") and ! ("bang")
- dan_manges 16y agoThere are also many different ways that people pronounce -> and =>, although it might vary depending on programming language.
- pavel_lishin 16y agoHow do you pronounce it? I usually say "arrow", or "dash-greater-than"... but come to think of it, I very rarely have to ever actually say this.
- RickHull 16y ago=> is known as a fat comma or a rocket in Ruby circles.
- pavel_lishin 16y agoRocket makes sense, but fat comma?
- onedognight 16y agoIn Perl "=>" is (almost) a comma, i.e. { a => 1, b => 2} is the same as { "a", 1, "b" , 2 }. I assume Ruby with its Perl heritage has this to some degree.
- cpeterso 16y ago<=> is the "spaceship" operator in Perl, Ruby, and Groovy.
- wanderr 16y agoOne of my co-workers uses "cash" for $. I think that's the worst possible choice for pronunciation since it sounds just like "cache", which is another thing you need to talk about fairly frequently.
- pavel_lishin 16y agoAlso could easily be mistaken for "hash".
- jankassens 16y agoIt's also in (and probably a copy of) the Jargon File: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/A/ASCII.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/A/ASCII.html
- jcl 16y agoYes, The New Hacker's Dictionary is a distillation of the Jargon File. Both are maintained by Eric S. Raymond.
- nik61 16y agoI refer those interested in this topic to the INTERCAL character naming conventions, now hallowed by tradition and skirting the edge of madness. As a taster . is one-spot : is two-spot , is tail and ; is hybrid. # is mesh. <- is known as an 'angle worm' and is pronounced 'gets'. It goes on from there.
- jcl 16y agoThese are in Jeff's chart. And really most of them shouldn't be: they aren't "rare" pronunciations -- they're non-existent pronunciations. Nobody uses them, except to point out how silly INTERCAL is. And rightly so, since INTERCAL was created to be unusable. However, there are a couple that, despite the INTERCAL authors' best efforts, have entered common usage, according to the chart: "mesh" and "splat".
- atomicdog 16y agoSome people pronounce "?" as "Huh"? Might as well call it a "WTF mark".
- m_myers 16y agoSurely you're thinking of the interrobang‽ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrobang http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrobang
- spatulon 16y agoAnother source of confusion is the meaning of the word "brackets": +----+-----------------+-------------+ | | [] | () | +----+-----------------+-------------+ | US | brackets | parentheses | | UK | square brackets | brackets | +----+-----------------+-------------+
- meric 16y ago| AU | square brackets | parentheses | +----+-----------------+-------------+ :(
- michaelcampbell 16y agoIs there nothing commonly called just 'brackets' in Oz?
- nailer 16y agoYeah, these are brackets for me (), these are square brackets [].
- meric 16y agoIn high school, my maths teachers all insist ( ) are `parentheses`. The sibling post's author thinks that ( ) are brackets. Clearly there are two different populations here. That's why the need to explicitly specify which "brackets".
- burke 16y ago| CA | [[any of the above]] | [[any of the above]] | +----+----------------------+----------------------+ I don't think I've heard two different people refer to them consistently.
- Vivtek 16y ago| Indiana | square brackets | parentheses | +---------+-----------------+-------------+ That, or I'm a displaced Australian.
- DTanner 16y agoI work with French programmers, so that opens an entire other can of worms. Colon becomes "two points" and semi-colon becomes "point comma".
- fbu 16y agoAs a French speaker it make total sense to me; it just describes it. I just searched quickly how to explain that the semi-colon is somehow half a colon. I couldn't find anything.
- michaelcampbell 16y agoI'm not a French speaker, but those terms make perfect sense to me also, even though I've only just heard them here for the first time.
- sp332 16y agoMaybe it has to do with the amount of time you pause when reading aloud? You pause for less time at a semi-colon then at a "full" colon.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- pluies_public 16y agoBeing French, I still find these names way better (as in clearer and more understandable for a foreigner) than the English ones. Why is ":" called a "colon"? That makes no sense!
- crgwbr 16y agoSo am I the only one who calls "-" a tack? As in chmod tack R
- michaelcampbell 16y agoNever heard that one before. "dash" or "minus" is all I've ever come across.
- nailer 16y agoMinus always annoys me, because it's long and most times (e.g., chmod <dash>R )you're never actually minusing anything. * * Some Solaris commands use plus and minus to add and subtract things, but a) everyone hates Solaris commands b) this breaks with convention, hence a).
- michaelcampbell 16y agoYes, I agree. Most "minus" people from my experience have been non-programmers, or at least non-everyday-unix-users that I've either had to train or walk through procedures, etc. And almost universally young.
- StuffMaster 16y agoYeah, "minus" is math and sounds wrong on the command line.
- Dylan16807 16y agoI suppose 'minus' makes things slightly longer, but is there a way to distinguish between R and r without three extra syllables? Both are likely to come up when chmodding.
- nolanw 16y ago"Big 'r'" and "small 'r'"?
- meric 16y ago
- jazzyb 16y agoWhen I first started programming, I didn't know which of the two symbols / or \ was "forward slash" or "back slash", so I got into the habit of calling them "uphill" and "downhill", respectively. I still tend to use those terms when I'm working with people who aren't computer savvy, and those terms tend to be a bit more intuitive and help avoid confusion.
- jpadkins 16y agouphill and downhill assume going left to right. forward slash and backslash both assume going left to right. How is this an improvement? Maybe call them right-slash and left-slash, with the lean prefix implied? This would probably help our right to left language friends.
- RodgerTheGreat 16y agoCall me biased, but every programming language I'm aware of that isn't related to Piet[1] or Befunge[2] reads from left to right, and both of those are gag options. Programming languages in general take their cue from English, so it doesn't seem that unreasonable to me to assume that programmers know enough English to assume left to right. [1] http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet.html [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Befunge
- jazzyb 16y agoI'm a little ashamed to admit it, but I always had a hard time remembering where the "hinge" was on the slashes. Let me explain: Assume that the slash begins like a pipe |. If the slash has a hinge at the bottom (like most people intuitively assume), then / is "leaning forward" and \ is "leaning back". However, if, when you look at the slash, you assume the hinge is on the top, then it looks like / is "swinging back" and \ is "swinging forward". So until I figured out where people were putting the "hinge", "back" and "forward" seemed arbitrary. I know it sounds strange, but it was a great source of confusion for me. Edit: The phrase "lefty loosey, righty tighty" also confused me until I figured out that "left" and "right" were relative to the direction that the top of the screw/bolt moved, not the bottom.
- RodgerTheGreat 16y agoIt's a little silly, but I've pronounced a '{' or '}' as a 'curly brace' ever since I played Cave Story[1], in which one of the main characters has that name. Before that, I think I called them 'curly brackets'. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_story http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_story
- djacobs 16y agoI don't know if I would call this a "pronunciation guide", in the sense that it doesn't tell you how to actually stress the syllables or say any particular letters. Instead, it's more of a "naming guide" or "verbalization guide" for glyphs that don't map to specific vocal patterns. Nitpick? Yes. This is HN, after all.
- AnthonyJBentley 16y ago<> !*''# ^"`$$- !*=@$_ %*<> ~#4 &[]../ |{,,SYSTEM HALTED Pronounced: Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash, Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash, Bang splat equal at dollar under-score, Percent splat waka waka tilde number four, Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash, Vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma CRASH. http://www.ascii-art.de/ascii/pqr/poem.txt http://www.ascii-art.de/ascii/pqr/poem.txt
- jxcole 16y agoA related article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1181243 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1181243 Openstache and closestache are two very good names for { and }, primarily because they are shorter.
- Vivtek 16y agoExtra points for listing the INTERCAL names!
- billpg 16y agoIt annoys me when people on TV use "forward slash" when reading out URLs. Makes we want to tell people that URLs never use backward-slashes!
- JoeAltmaier 16y ago"Ampersand" is apparently a corruption of "and per se and" which was the (now extinct) last line of the Alphabet Song a hundred years ago. Anybody can corroborate?
- Jebdm 16y agohttp://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=ampersand&searchmode=none http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=ampersand&sea...
- bostonpete 16y agoI have trouble believing that "apostrophe" is more common among programmers than "single quote"...
- program 16y agoIn a standard italian keyboard layout the '\' is placed between TAB and ESC, and '/' is shift+7. A lot of people think that '\' is the slash and '/' the backslash leading to some confusion among non-programmers (and some escaped characters here and there.)