5 ms·

The name for #! must have originated as hashbang which was abbreviated as ’shbang and then later gained an e to become shebang?

vhasus 4y ago
I always thought it was sharp bang = shabang
- jjgreen 4y ago
  Sharp's a different thing, ♯ against #, it always amuses me that Microsoft's version of Java should be called C♯ when their OS has such dreadful support for Unicode that it's almost universally written C#, so C-hash (or C-pound for you left-ponders).
  - legalcorrection 4y ago
    Windows handles Unicode just fine. It’s just not UTF-8. The reason they used # is that it’s on the standard keyboard. But hey, don’t let me get in the way of some ignorant Windows-bashing.
2143 4y ago
Where I'm from: "#" => "hash" (never had I heard it being called "pound") "!" => "exclamation mark/point" (never had I heard it being called "bang") So to me "#!" was "hash exclamation" in my college in home-country. Then I went to USA for an exchange program, where people consistently called it "she bang" and "pound bang". Took me a while to get it.
- dfawcus 4y ago
  Or even 'hash pling'.
- anttiharju 4y ago
  > never had I heard it being called "bang" DuckDuckGo also calls exclamation points bangs https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang
  - tyingq 4y ago
    The use in the unixy area was probably reinforced by UUCP "bang paths".
- adhesive_wombat 4y ago
  I first heard "bang" for "!" in the context of "interrobang" (‽). Notably I seem to recall I first encountered it as the symbol found on the forehead of Barry Trotter, a parody Harry Potter published in 2001.
  - checkyoursudo 4y ago
    That one is my personal favorite. Ref: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/interrobang https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/interrobang
- throw0101a 4y ago
  > "!" => "exclamation mark/point" (never had I heard it being called "bang") Used in Unix-y circles since at least the 1980s, where "bang paths" were used for UUCP routing: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP#Mail_routing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP#Mail_routing * http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/bang-path.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/bang-path.html
- Maursault 4y ago
  Hash is extremely contemporary, newer than number, and still a nickname. Pound is older, but it's true proper name is octothorpe.
  - skissane 4y ago
    Outside of North America, hash has been the standard term for many decades; in that time period, the name pound was rarely used for it outside of the US. Number sign was adopted in international standards as a neutral compromise between US and UK usage; apparently, it is/was also the standard term in Canada, and saw regional usage in some northern parts of the US. I wonder whether the derived term hashtag is causing hash to make inroads into US usage? Octothorpe has never been its “proper” name in any country; just a jocular nickname originating in the US telco industry, which spread from there to computing.
    - Maursault 4y ago
      > Octothorpe has never been its “proper” name in any country; just a jocular nickname originating in the US telco industry, which spread from there to computing. Octothope was coined by Bell Labs. It is certainly not jocular (what?). In point of fact, it is that symbol's proper name and how it is referred to in all Bell manuals and documentation, and this word coinage is little to no different to how the British began using # for pound to distinguish it from £, the currency. Even though "hash," by hundreds of years, predates all other names for the symbol (originally, "hatch," marks one would make with a hatchet), hashing, the mathematical practice since the 1940's of transformation of a string of characters into a usually shorter fixed-length value or key that represents the original string, was not married in identity or meaning or abbreviation to the # symbol by convention until probably 1990, regardless of location on the planet or country not in North America. No one anywhere in the universe was using the hash symbol in, say, 1975, to refer to the mathematical hashing in computer science. In 1975, the # was the octothrope properly and most commonly (even if no one used that term, they all had a telephone and they still do, and every telephone today still has an octothorpe button, i.e. not a hash button), or the number sign or the pound sign by popularity. # was never used as an abbreviation for mathematical hashing, again, until maybe late 1980's, probably like about 1991 # became conventionally used by programmers, computer scientists and mathematicians to mean mathematical hash. And even today, every county in the world that has telephones properly has an octothorpe key, not a hash or pound key. Bell coined the term and established it's usage long, long before # was used for math hashes, and even to this day, the octothorpe symbol is likely more common than the hash symbol, just because there are so many damn phones.
- contradictioned 4y ago
  Or in Germany, it's sometimes called "Lattenzaun" (lattice fence)
fsckboy 4y ago
the word "shebang" was a common word in the middle of the last century, so with exclamation point being bang, and i think more likely, shell starting with "sh", it was undoubtedly straight up selected because of the match to the word. "If you put a script in a file and start it with a hash and make it executable, /bin/sh will run the whole shebang for you" would be an accurate use of the word shebang. A similar bit of slang would be "/bin/sh will run the whole shootin' match for you"
- dylan604 4y ago
  >the word "shebang" was a common word in the middle of the last century, taking just that part of the sentence out of context, that almost reads like some historical tome or some fantasy novel. or maybe it's that i lived a good chunk of the middle of last century and this kind of thing makes realize i've been doing this a lot longer than i'd like to admit
  - Izkata 4y ago
    Actually taking that part out of context reminded me that "shebang" is a word outside of technology. It means something like "everything involved", the phrase I'm remembering is "the whole shebang". So even under that original meaning it fits.
    - lioeters 4y ago
      > shebang (n.) - 1862, "hut, shed, shelter," popularized among soldiers in the U.S. Civil War, but like other Civil War slang (such as skedaddle) of uncertain origin. > Perhaps an alteration of shebeen (q.v.), but shebang in the sense "tavern," a seemingly necessary transitional sense, is not attested before 1878 and shebeen seems to have been not much used in the U.S. Bartlett's 1877 edition describes it as "A strange word that had its origin during the late civil war. It is applied alike to a room, a shop, or a hut, a tent, a cabin; an engine house." > Phrase the whole shebang first recorded 1869, but relation to the earlier use of the word is obscure. Either or both senses also might be mangled pronunciations of French char-à-banc, a bus-like wagon with many seats. https://www.etymonline.com/word/shebang https://www.etymonline.com/word/shebang
c3534l 4y ago
Doubt it. Hash was a pretty uncommon name for # until Twitter introduced hashtags.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- robin_reala 4y ago
  In en-US, sure. But it was basically the only usage in en-GB, due to £.
- IncRnd 4y ago
  Not really. Many people called # the crosshatch, hatch mark, or hash mark. Twitter was late to the game.
dtgriscom 4y ago
Whenever I'm about to start a bash script, I have to say "shebang" in my head to remember which goes first: the "#" or the "!".

vhasus 4y ago

I always thought it was sharp bang = shabang

jjgreen 4y ago
Sharp's a different thing, ♯ against #, it always amuses me that Microsoft's version of Java should be called C♯ when their OS has such dreadful support for Unicode that it's almost universally written C#, so C-hash (or C-pound for you left-ponders).
- legalcorrection 4y ago
  Windows handles Unicode just fine. It’s just not UTF-8. The reason they used # is that it’s on the standard keyboard. But hey, don’t let me get in the way of some ignorant Windows-bashing.

2143 4y ago

Where I'm from: "#" => "hash" (never had I heard it being called "pound") "!" => "exclamation mark/point" (never had I heard it being called "bang") So to me "#!" was "hash exclamation" in my college in home-country. Then I went to USA for an exchange program, where people consistently called it "she bang" and "pound bang". Took me a while to get it.

dfawcus 4y ago
Or even 'hash pling'.
anttiharju 4y ago
> never had I heard it being called "bang" DuckDuckGo also calls exclamation points bangs https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang
- tyingq 4y ago
  The use in the unixy area was probably reinforced by UUCP "bang paths".
adhesive_wombat 4y ago
I first heard "bang" for "!" in the context of "interrobang" (‽). Notably I seem to recall I first encountered it as the symbol found on the forehead of Barry Trotter, a parody Harry Potter published in 2001.
- checkyoursudo 4y ago
  That one is my personal favorite. Ref: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/interrobang https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/interrobang
throw0101a 4y ago
> "!" => "exclamation mark/point" (never had I heard it being called "bang") Used in Unix-y circles since at least the 1980s, where "bang paths" were used for UUCP routing: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP#Mail_routing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP#Mail_routing * http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/bang-path.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/bang-path.html
Maursault 4y ago
Hash is extremely contemporary, newer than number, and still a nickname. Pound is older, but it's true proper name is octothorpe.
- skissane 4y ago
  Outside of North America, hash has been the standard term for many decades; in that time period, the name pound was rarely used for it outside of the US. Number sign was adopted in international standards as a neutral compromise between US and UK usage; apparently, it is/was also the standard term in Canada, and saw regional usage in some northern parts of the US. I wonder whether the derived term hashtag is causing hash to make inroads into US usage? Octothorpe has never been its “proper” name in any country; just a jocular nickname originating in the US telco industry, which spread from there to computing.
  - Maursault 4y ago
    > Octothorpe has never been its “proper” name in any country; just a jocular nickname originating in the US telco industry, which spread from there to computing. Octothope was coined by Bell Labs. It is certainly not jocular (what?). In point of fact, it is that symbol's proper name and how it is referred to in all Bell manuals and documentation, and this word coinage is little to no different to how the British began using # for pound to distinguish it from £, the currency. Even though "hash," by hundreds of years, predates all other names for the symbol (originally, "hatch," marks one would make with a hatchet), hashing, the mathematical practice since the 1940's of transformation of a string of characters into a usually shorter fixed-length value or key that represents the original string, was not married in identity or meaning or abbreviation to the # symbol by convention until probably 1990, regardless of location on the planet or country not in North America. No one anywhere in the universe was using the hash symbol in, say, 1975, to refer to the mathematical hashing in computer science. In 1975, the # was the octothrope properly and most commonly (even if no one used that term, they all had a telephone and they still do, and every telephone today still has an octothorpe button, i.e. not a hash button), or the number sign or the pound sign by popularity. # was never used as an abbreviation for mathematical hashing, again, until maybe late 1980's, probably like about 1991 # became conventionally used by programmers, computer scientists and mathematicians to mean mathematical hash. And even today, every county in the world that has telephones properly has an octothorpe key, not a hash or pound key. Bell coined the term and established it's usage long, long before # was used for math hashes, and even to this day, the octothorpe symbol is likely more common than the hash symbol, just because there are so many damn phones.
contradictioned 4y ago
Or in Germany, it's sometimes called "Lattenzaun" (lattice fence)

fsckboy 4y ago

the word "shebang" was a common word in the middle of the last century, so with exclamation point being bang, and i think more likely, shell starting with "sh", it was undoubtedly straight up selected because of the match to the word. "If you put a script in a file and start it with a hash and make it executable, /bin/sh will run the whole shebang for you" would be an accurate use of the word shebang. A similar bit of slang would be "/bin/sh will run the whole shootin' match for you"

dylan604 4y ago
>the word "shebang" was a common word in the middle of the last century, taking just that part of the sentence out of context, that almost reads like some historical tome or some fantasy novel. or maybe it's that i lived a good chunk of the middle of last century and this kind of thing makes realize i've been doing this a lot longer than i'd like to admit
- Izkata 4y ago
  Actually taking that part out of context reminded me that "shebang" is a word outside of technology. It means something like "everything involved", the phrase I'm remembering is "the whole shebang". So even under that original meaning it fits.
  - lioeters 4y ago
    > shebang (n.) - 1862, "hut, shed, shelter," popularized among soldiers in the U.S. Civil War, but like other Civil War slang (such as skedaddle) of uncertain origin. > Perhaps an alteration of shebeen (q.v.), but shebang in the sense "tavern," a seemingly necessary transitional sense, is not attested before 1878 and shebeen seems to have been not much used in the U.S. Bartlett's 1877 edition describes it as "A strange word that had its origin during the late civil war. It is applied alike to a room, a shop, or a hut, a tent, a cabin; an engine house." > Phrase the whole shebang first recorded 1869, but relation to the earlier use of the word is obscure. Either or both senses also might be mangled pronunciations of French char-à-banc, a bus-like wagon with many seats. https://www.etymonline.com/word/shebang https://www.etymonline.com/word/shebang

c3534l 4y ago

Doubt it. Hash was a pretty uncommon name for # until Twitter introduced hashtags.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
robin_reala 4y ago
In en-US, sure. But it was basically the only usage in en-GB, due to £.
IncRnd 4y ago
Not really. Many people called # the crosshatch, hatch mark, or hash mark. Twitter was late to the game.

dtgriscom 4y ago

Whenever I'm about to start a bash script, I have to say "shebang" in my head to remember which goes first: the "#" or the "!".