A short word on nomenclature
These symbols have accepted names (in the context of programming):
[ ]These are opening and closing brackets. They are square, so are sometimes called square brackets.{ }These are opening and closing braces. You could call them curly braces, but there’s no need.( )Theses are parentheses. One is a parenthesis. If those are a bit of a mouth- or keyboardful, call them parens. Don’t call them brackets or I’ll destroy your keyboard.~This is a tilde.|This is a pipe.
These symbols have multiple accepted names.
#I call this a hash because I’m British. Americans call it a pound sign. Pedants call it an octothorpe.*Asterisk, star, splat. Definitely not an “asterix”.!Exclamation mark/point, bang.< >Less-than and greater-than, but may also be called angle brackets..Full-stop, period, dot.?Question mark, query.
I’ve never heard “full-stop” in a programming context, and “splat” might be Ruby-specific, but the rest are spot on. I’d also like to add:
/ – slash \ – backslash
And finally…
?! – quizbang (most often seen in IE-related comments, preceded by “wtf” or “omgwtf”)
@”Cowboy” Ben Alman Yeah, full-stop isn’t used much, you’re right.
I didn’t bother with slash and backslash because I think they’re pretty universally accepted.
quizbang – love it :)
Actually, that: ‽ is an Interrobang
don’t forget
^ – caret or “That damn key I can never hit without looking at the keyboard.”
Worked with a programmer once who called it “the ‘hat’ key”. He was weird.
Interesting. Wikipedia suggests that in UK they’re also known as brackets.
@Jan Stepien That’s correct, but here I’m making the distinction between general British English and programming-specific English. There’s as much need to be explicit about what you mean in everyday English, but when you’re talking programming it’s important to be unambiguous.
An update on the UTF-8 situation – it’s now fixed! Sorry to everyone for their trashed symbols or diacritics. I followed the instructions here in case anyone’s interested.
Argh, my comment got mangled by Markdown. Hope this works.
How about:
-: dash (not slash! Yes, I’ve heard this one being called a slash. Not hash either. Sometimes minus. Or is it hyphen? Wikipedia, don’t tell me I’m wrong!)_: underscore": double quotes': single quotes`: backtickHow do you pronounce -> and =>?
@valadil Good question. I’ve generally called the first one “arrow” or “points to”. The second one’s often called a “hash rocket” in Ruby, because it’s used in hash literals and looks like a rocket. I think it depends on what you’re using it for…
I’ve only ever heard lisp programmers call ‘( )’ parentheses. To everyone else I know they are brackets, thus the reference to ‘square brackets’ to distinguish them.
I have usually called the braces curly brackets, but don’t have the need to refer to them often. Perhaps if I did, I’d get used to the name braces.