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But What's Up with That ¥?
- lifthrasiir 5y agoMore accurately, this is one of last artifacts from ISO/IEC 646 which allowed several punctuations to be replaced with local characters in domestic variants. Currency characters in particular commonly replaced # or $, but East Asian variants instead chose \ and that got stuck in their own multibyte character encodings.
- solarmist 5y agoWow. I was today years old when I learned that Japan considers ￥ as the canonical directory separator. I always saw this when I switched to Japanese and thought it was a display quirk of being the English version of whatever software and that a "real" version of Japanese Windows, or whatever, would have \'s. Never stopped to consider that ￥ might be considered the canonical separator.
- jinseokim 5y agoKorean Windows also shows ￦(Korean Won) symbol instead of \.
- smoldesu 5y agoWow, lainposting on Hacker News. I thought I'd never see the day!
- jinto36 5y agoIn the Wired, everyone's connected.
- NikolaNovak 5y agoIn ex Yugoslavian keyboards, back in the days of DOS 3.x, the backslash was frequently usurped by the letter Đ. It's 30 years later, I've been speaking and dreaming and internal monologuing in English longer than in my native language (whatever it might be:) - but I still mentally read c:\Program Files\my folder\my file.txt As See colon DJ program files DJ my folder DJ my file dot tee ex tee (where DJ or Đ is closest pronounced as G in angel or Angelica though not quite)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> (where DJ or Đ is closest pronounced as G in angel or Angelica though not quite) Would you say the English sound is closer to Đ or DŽ? Does it vary by speaker? Does Đ use the tip of the tongue, or the middle?
- zvrba 5y agoNative croatian speaker. This is how I'd answer the question: Đ - angel ("soft", tip of the tongue) DŽ - jeans ("hard", middle)
- thaumasiotes 5y agoYou think an English word might use either sound based on the sounds that surround it? (Not out of the question by any means, but not what I expected.) In your language, does a minimal pair exist that distinguishes Đ from DŽ? A minimal pair is a pair of words that sound identical except for the sound we want to contrast - in English, "sat" and "chat" are a minimal pair contrasting /s/ with /tʃ/ (or č if you prefer). English does not have any concept of a contrast between a 'soft' J and a 'hard' J (or a 'soft' "ch" or a 'hard' "ch"). (Though again, that doesn't mean we don't make a distinction - it just means that if we do, we don't realize we're doing it.) I am familiar with a similar distinction in Mandarin Chinese, where the soft sound is spelled with pinyin "j" as in beijing and the hard sound is spelled "zh" as in zhongguo, but the contrast isn't perfect -- there are no minimal pairs, and in fact there is no context which would allow a free choice between either sound. If you know the vowel that follows the sound, then you also know whether the sound will be soft or hard. Is that true for Croatian? I'm surprised at your answer wrt use of the tongue -- in Mandarin "j", the part of the tongue that makes contact with the roof of the mouth is the middle, and in "zh", the part of the tongue that makes contact with the roof of the mouth is the tip.
- pndy 5y ago
- justinator 5y agoI think S.E.L was released in 1998, no?
- mr_vile 5y agoI know a couple of people that went out of their way to have the yen backslash on their PC. It certainly is charming in a way. Kind of like how email addresses used to be written like: eddie!STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM!CStacy@EDDIE.MIT.EDU
- mr_vile 5y agoFor anyone that doesn't know, the ! is for UUCP routing.
- LeoPanthera 5y agoAnd is known as a Bang Path: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP#Bang_path https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP#Bang_path
- notreallyserio 5y agoI remember using bang paths to send myself email via several different networks. I felt like such a Hackerman.
- linguae 5y agoI remember seeing this when I was a CS research intern working at a major Japanese company in Kawasaki back in 2010. I'm from America, and this was my first time in Japan. At the company, our workstations ran Windows XP; I guess the company refused upgrading to Vista, and Windows 7 was not yet approved. This article brought back two memories: 1. Learning how to code on a Japanese keyboard, where some of the symbols were in different locations, and where I needed to get used to having two small space bars instead of one single, long space bar. Eventually one of my coworkers introduced me to the Happy Hacking Keyboard (https://happyhackingkb.com https://happyhackingkb.com), which is popular among programmers in Japan due to its typing feel and the fact it has a version with a US-style keyboard layout. I stuck with that keyboard for the rest of my internship. 2. Seeing ¥n in my code instead of \n. Eventually I ended up installing a Linux virtual machine on my workstation that was localized to American English, though a big reason for this was because my internship project was writing a Linux kernel module. But I still needed to use my Japanese knowledge to use Microsoft Office and other programs on Windows. My eight months in Kawasaki were among the best in my life. Since then I've been to Japan six more times, and I'm looking forward to visiting Japan again once it's reopen to tourism.
- makeitdouble 5y agoNow that a significant number of programmers use Mac keyboard, I frequently see people go for the "International" layout that is available from every Apple stores() for all keyboard including laptops. It's pretty close to the US layout, with a bigger entry key and two more keys as a bonus. () in some store I think it's the "GB international". Also, it's such as shame all layouts aren't available from all countries, when in practice ordering a laptop means having it shipped from China anyway.
- gumby 5y agoI think it’s partially a local inventory issue but more importantly reduces the chance the customer will accidentally order the wrong thing, at the cost of making an unusual case more complicated.
- 5y ago
- artdigital 5y agoI remember seeing this for the first time when I did a short exchange month in Japan. A friend of my host family asked me to fix their PC and install a printer, and when I saw yen signs all over the operating system I first thought he accidentally caught a bad virus. Took me a while of banging my head against why "\" (as in C:\) is not working to realize that yen = \. Still had no idea why this was actually the case
- Isamu 5y agoThat reminds me - I need to upgrade my NAVI so that I can access the Wired.
- mappu 5y agoPresent day! Present time! Ha ha ha!
- glandium 5y agoThe funny part is that to this day, many places still show ¥ instead of \ in Japanese locales, even with UTF-8. Starting with the Windows command line prompt. And on the opposite side, in a terminal, on macOS, hitting the ¥ key inputs a \, but not in other applications (including vscode), where you need to use option+¥ for a \. (BTW, I have no idea how to type ¥ in the terminal on macos with a Japanese keyboard)
- marcan_42 5y agoAnd conversely, because those users/developers see ¥, they think everyone else does too. I regularly get emails from Japanese shops with currency denominated in \.
- glandium 5y agoNow that you mention it, I receive those too.
- skhr0680 5y ago> (BTW, I have no idea how to type ¥ in the terminal on macos with a Japanese keyboard) fn+¥ works for me
- awirth 5y agoNow that I live in Japan, I've come to learn that for Japanese Windows users, seeing the ¥ symbol as a path separator is normal, it isn't a quirk or a bug. In fact, IIRC the copy machine in the closest convenience store shows a ¥ as the path separator when browsing a USB drive, even though I'm almost certain it's not running Windows. A few years back, I wrote a CTF challenge around this quirk of SHIFT_JIS. It used a python MySQLdb connection set to SHIFT_JIS mode and a custom naïve mysql escape function. The trick was to use a yen symbol and have it get interpreted as an unescaped backslash, leading to a SQL injection. Also it was all over websockets just to be annoying. There's a few nice writeups from it: https://www.kernelpicnic.net/2016/03/06/BKPCTF-Wonderland-Good-Morning-Write-Up.html https://www.kernelpicnic.net/2016/03/06/BKPCTF-Wonderland-Go... https://0day.work/boston-key-party-ctf-2016-writeups/ https://0day.work/boston-key-party-ctf-2016-writeups/ https://security.szurek.pl/en/boston-key-party-ctf-2016-good-morning-and-optiproxy-writeup/ https://security.szurek.pl/en/boston-key-party-ctf-2016-good... (this one has the original challenge source)
- emodendroket 5y agoI mean, yeah, it's been that way for decades. Why wouldn't they see it as normal?
- Tagbert 5y agoIt may be running Windows CE
- thisisnico 5y agoWe have a Toshiba CNC machine at our shop that enters paths like this on the controller, always wondered why; now I know.
- ensiferum 5y agoBut you can always just use a different layout for your keyboard. So eve with a keyboard with physical key engravings in Japanese you could just use a US layout.
- tom_ 5y ago
- koyote 5y agoI remember changing my Windows XP machine to Japanese in order to learn the language (protip: try to learn the characters for the common things before doing this) and suddenly all my file paths had ¥ in them. I thought I must have messed something up, it was very jarring to see. I think the yens everywhere were more of a reason for me to revert the change than the fact that I essentially locked myself out of changing any of the settings that I had not yet memorised...
- cheese_van 5y agoScrolling down, I read that the Chromium team put out a patch that, if the site wishes, disallows "view source"? That's pretty disturbing. I taught myself HTML by viewing source. And sometimes I just want to see what they're doing. Can this be confirmed?
- fomine3 5y agoNote that U+00A5 is also ¥ sign. It's really confusing so I avoid it and use ￥ (U+FFE5 double width) instead for yen sign.
- Thorrez 5y agoWhat's confusing about it? Is the confusion that there are 2 unicode characters (U+00A5 and U+FFE5) for the same thing?
- fomine3 5y agoThe original yen mark for Japanese computer is "\" U+005C, that is rendered same as U+00A5.
- pwdisswordfish8 5y agoU+005C is REVERSE SOLIDUS, it always has been.
- fomine3 5y agoI wish it was before Unicode.
- divingdragon 5y agoYes in theory, but in practice some Japanese fonts use the yen sign glyph for U+005C, the most common ones being those that come with Windows.
- runarberg 5y agoHow to people in general feel about the backslash (\) in the non-english speaking world? Me personally I hate it. It is OK for escaping (as it doesn’t happen that often) but for things like typing out LaTeX or paths on Windows is awful to an extend where I would rather not write LaTeX outside of my custom keyboard (Caps Lock as third level shift and Emacs key-chord of ðö together [icelandic keyboard] types \).
- runarberg 5y agoTo clarify for people who only ever have seen English (or English derived) keyboards. The backslash (\) is usually bound to a third level shift. On some Windows you can reach third level shift with either a Ctrl + Alt or a single AltGr. On most linuxes AltGr is the only way to reach third level shift. This is a problem since AltGr is usually on the same side (right hand side) of the keyboard as the \ key, so you usually have to do some finger gymnastics to type it. On Macs Option double functions as a third level shifts which causes a whole different set of issues as many keyboard shortcuts also use the option key, so typing \ becomes ambiguous in some contexts.
- arketyp 5y agoI didn't always know that [ ] are immediate keys and { } are shift characters on a US keyboard. I had internalized the AltGr pain as something that just came with the territory of programming.
- johnwalkr 5y agoFor this reason many Japanese programmers use US layout.
- thriftwy 5y agoThis problem does not exist for Cyrillic layout, since we always have two keyboard layouts (qwerty, йцукен) and switch between them. Press-release shift, then ctrl-shift, lately caps lock became fashionable. Clueless software such as KDE offers cumbersome switching hotkey such as ctrl-shift-K, which nobody uses in favour of a single easy combo. So, if we can't find [ or } or / on cyrillic layout, we just switch to latin and punch it. I've never seen a latin layout which did not have '\' readily available. When you need to type a path, it almost always contains some latin letters ("/usr" or "C:\") so you will have to switch regardless. Still, we have one more variable to occupy our mind, "what's the current keyboard layout I'm on". There were even software which did automatic layout switching based on dictionary heuristics. йцукен is also very efficient key placement-wise so we don't have anything like Dvorak layout. What's a bummer is ',' which requires pressing shift.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> There's a "typo" for one thing: that top line should be "%c>%c¥n" rather than "%c%¥n", judging by what's below. Um... what? The top line already says "%c>%c¥n", doesn't it?
- aleatorisch 5y agoIronically there's a typo in his calling out of the typo. He meant to write: should be "%c>%c¥n" rather than "%c>%¥n". The second c is missing in the screenshot.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- unsignedint 5y agoRight, and with this assumption, some websites use it to list price on items, which makes things bit confusing at times. For example: \5000 \6000 \2000 I think mobile (and web browsers, too) tend to not display these as yen symbol even when the locale is set to Japanese, so they are displayed as a backslash followed by numbers.
- grishka 5y agoInterestingly, Russian DOS/Windows, despite having an entire Cyrillic alphabet in the upper part of the codepage, still used \ as the path separator. One weirdness is that we read drive letters as Latin, so C: is "disk tse".
- alanhaha 5y agoYes, I can see path like C¥Program Files¥... when I install old Japanese games.
- zephyr9 5y agoI'm glad to learn this. It explains why my Pomera DM30 (which uses shift-JIS) displays '¥' instead of '\'. I'd thought it was a bug.
- grahamlee 5y agoThe solution for internationalist C users who want their source to look the same for everyone is to write the newline character as ??/n.
- kiryin 5y agoIt's pretty cool. When you think about it, the backslash is kind of a useless character, apart from windows paths and escapes I can't think of much use for it, both of which are rather arbitrary. As far as I know it has no real use in writing. I wouldn't be opposed to replacing it with something else and making room for something useful on the keyboard.
- radarsat1 5y agoI'm actually curious about the history of the backslash character. It does seem that it's something that isn't needed, and is not part of normal English writing, so I wonder how it made it into ASCII. Was it already in regular use in teletype? Was it used in technical writing in the 70's? Was it useful for formatting telegrams or something?
- Symbiote 5y agoI think the purpose was to allow the symbols for logical and and or: /\ \/
- radarsat1 5y agofascinating. So the original ASCII was already conceptualized in terms of composed characters, that's kind of amazing. Maybe it was viewed as "saving" a bit, only having to introduce one character instead of two. Shows the importance of programming language design even that early in computing history.
- bradhe 5y agoMan. I'm old enough to remember dealing with this in the early 2000s.
- danecek099 5y agoAnd you don't seem to understand
- prerok 5y agoHeh, back in the day, in Yugoslavia, it was Đ. Fun times :)