ASCII Pronunciation Rules for Programmers
As programmers, we deal with a lot of unusual keyboard characters that typical users rarely need to type, much less think about:
$ # % {} * [] ~ & <>
Even the characters that are fairly regularly used in everyday writing -- such as the humble dash, parens, period, and question mark -- have radically different meaning in programming languages.
This is all well and good, but you'll eventually have to read code out loud to another developer for some reason. And then you're in an awkward position, indeed.
How do you pronounce these unusual ASCII characters?
We all do it, but we don't necessarily think much about the words we choose. I certainly hadn't thought much about this until yesterday, when I read the following comment left on Exploring Wide Finder:
A friend sent me a Java code fragment in which he looped through printing "Thank You!" a million times (it was a response to a professor who had extended the deadline on a paper). I responded with a single line of Ruby to do the same, and a single line of Lisp.He wrote back: "Underscores, pipes, octothorpes, curly braces -- sheesh... I'll take a mild dose of verbosity if means I don't have to code something that looks like it's been zipped already!"
What the heck is an octothorpe? I know this as the pound key, but that turns out to be a US-centric word; most other cultures know it as the hash key.
I'm often surprised to hear what other programmers name their ASCII characters. Not that the words I personally use to identify my ASCII characters are any more correct, but there's far more variability than you'd expect considering the rigid, highly literal mindset of most programmers.
Perhaps that's why I was so excited to discover the ASCII entry in The New Hacker's Dictionary, which Phil Glockner turned me on to. It's a fairly exhaustive catalog of the common names, rare names, and occasionally downright weird names that programmers associate with the ASCII characters sprinkled throughout their code.
How many of these ASCII pronunciations do you recognize? Which ones are the "correct" ones in your shop?
| Common Names | Rare Names | |||||
| ! |
exclamation mark bang pling excl not shriek |
|
||||
| " |
quotation marks quote double quote |
|
||||
| # |
|
|
||||
| $ |
dollar sign dollar |
|
||||
| % |
percent sign mod grapes |
double-oh-seven | ||||
| & |
ampersand amp amper and and sign |
address reference andpersand bitand background pretzel |
||||
| ' |
apostrophe single quote quote |
|
||||
| ( ) |
opening / closing parenthesis left / right paren left / right parenthesis left / right open / close open / close paren paren / thesis |
so/already lparen/rparen opening/closing parenthesis opening/closing round bracket left/right round bracket wax/wane parenthisey/unparenthisey left/right ear |
||||
| [ ] |
opening / closing bracket left / right bracket left / right square bracket bracket / unbracket |
square / unsquare u turn / u turn back |
||||
| { } |
opening / closing brace open / close brace left / right brace left / right squiggly left / right squiggly bracket/brace left / right curly bracket/brace |
brace / unbrace curly / uncurly leftit / rytit left / right squirrelly embrace / bracelet |
||||
| < > |
less / greater than bra / ket left / right angle left / right angle bracket left / right broket |
from / into (or towards) read from / write to suck / blow comes-from / gozinta in / out crunch / zap tic / tac angle / right angle |
||||
| * |
asterisk star splat |
|
||||
| + |
plus add |
cross intersection |
||||
| , | comma |
cedilla tail |
||||
| - |
dash hyphen minus |
worm option dak bithorpe |
||||
| . |
period dot point decimal point |
radix point full stop spot |
||||
| / |
slash stroke slant forward slash |
diagonal solidus over slak virgule slat |
||||
| \ |
|
bash reverse slant reversed virgule backslat |
||||
| : | colon |
dots two-spot |
||||
| ; |
semicolon semi |
weenie hybrid pit-thwong |
||||
| = |
equals gets takes |
quadrathorpe half-mesh |
||||
| ? |
question mark query ques |
|
||||
| @ |
at sign at strudel |
|
||||
| ^ |
circumflex caret hat control uparrow |
xor sign chevron shark (or shark-fin) to the fang pointer |
||||
| _ |
underline underscore underbar under |
score backarrow skid flatworm |
||||
| ` |
grave accent backquote left quote left single quote open quote grave |
|
||||
| | |
bar or or-bar v-bar pipe vertical bar |
vertical line gozinta thru pipesinta spike |
||||
| ~ |
tilde squiggle twiddle not |
approx wiggle swung dash enyay sqiggle (sic) |
If you're curious about the derivation of some of the odder names here, there are an extensive set of footnotes (and even more possible pronunciations) at the ascii-table.com pronunciation guide.
So the next time a programmer walks up to you and says, "oh, it's easy! Just type wax bang at hash buck grapes circumflex and splat wane", you'll know what they mean.
Maybe.