4 ms·

question: anyone know of where the pronunciation of "!" to be "bang" came from? I always called these exclamation points but see a lot of programmers calling th

question: anyone know of where the pronunciation of "!" to be "bang" came from? I always called these exclamation points but see a lot of programmers calling them "bangs." anyone?

AnimalMuppet 12y ago
Well, they are exclamation points. But for many punctuation characters, there's a hacker nickname (or more than one). I've heard of "bang" for "!", "hook" for "?", and "shriek" or "splat" for "#". The Jargon File has more detail: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/bang.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/bang.html
- lmartel 12y ago
  My favorite of these: I've worked with a few people who used "huh" for the coffeescript `?` operator.
  - quink 12y ago
    While I haven't seen anyone actually use this pronunciation I'd consider 'p', short for predicate, a fairly logical way of pronouncing '?'. If nothing else, it's LISPy in origin at least. Without actually being inherent to LISP. For example, with a ternary operator: var adult = (age > 18) ? true : false; Pronounced: 'adult' equals (age greater than 18) p true else false.
- BorisMelnik 12y ago
  thank you, I did a bit of research on this but didn't find anything as good as this.