ok@edai.UUCP (06/22/83)
Outside computerese (which has a lot of American English in it),
I have only heard the / character called
virgule
over
solidus
Solidus is the one I like most, and use. The origin of the name
is, I think, its use in the old Imperial monetary notation
pounds / shillings / pence
librae solidii denarii
That's where the abbreviation l.s.d. for "money" comes from too.
Seriously now, why BOTHER pronouncing these things? I've tried
reading a few lines of a program aloud to another programmer more
or less familiar with the same language. Result? All the words
right, and only the punctuation marks that he could GUESS correct.
People just aren't *used* to hearing punctuation marks pronounced,
and what they aren't used to, they do not hear. This experiment
has been repeated several times with several people, and it has
ALWAYS been much quicker for me to write what I mean and show them
the result. There are also considerable micro-cultural problems;
you spend more time explaining to someone that numero=sharp (and
discovering that he knows no music and thinks you mean "^" (which
looks sharp, doesn't it?) than you do communicating. As far as I
can see, the only utility of pronouncing punctuation is to
exclude outsiders.
By the way, # is NOT a number sign to people in the UK or
(most of) the Commonwealth. The number sign is a capital N
followed by a raised underlined o. This of course abbreviates
"numero", and the special flagging of the o is needed because
if the last letter of the abbreviation is the last letter of the
full word, you don't put in the full stop, so "No" could be
confused with "No". -
If you're interested in abbreviation, the apostrophe and the
abbrevation mark seem to have been separate characters (like
left/right quotation marks). The abbreviation mark looked like |_
(I need two lines for this, but it's a small raised sign). |