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Interrobang

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Re: Interrobang

#21

Post by ademarre »

josephpmay wrote: post #20
ademarre wrote: post #18

I don't have a strong opinion on the interrobang either way, but let's imagine we wanted to start a campaign for it to go mainstream. The most important thing that could happen would be for a popular auto-correct tool to start substituting it for '?!' and '!?'. MS Word would be ideal. People would start to get familiar with it when reading other's works. And when authoring, people tend to treat auto-correct like an a…

Microsoft word‽ Surly this campaign would be more successful if it started with autocorrect on phones.

That's a good point! But wouldn't we need better mobile keyboard support before that happens?

Re: Interrobang

#24

Post by Symbiote »

ademarre wrote: post #21
josephpmay wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft word‽ Surly this campaign would be more successful if it started with autocorrect on phones.

That's a good point! But wouldn't we need better mobile keyboard support before that happens?

The default keyboard on my Sony Xperia… something can already type a fair number of characters, but I don't think most people discover them.

These are all accessed by holding down keys on the number/punctuation view: ¢ ¯ — – ≈ ≠ ± ‡ † ‰ ÷ × « » ½ ¼ ⅛ ⅓ ⅔ ¾ ⅜ ² ³ ⁴ ⅝ ⁿ ⅞ • … ¿ ¡

They're not very discoverable like that.

Some are repeated, but these ones are on the second page of punctuation: § ¶ ° ¬ ~ © ® | ¦

I'm missing ‽ and a subscript 2 so I can write CO2 properly.

Re: Interrobang

#25

Post by Symbiote »

snarfy wrote: post #5
hurpaDurpa wrote: post #4

This would really make for a great exception operator, for one-liner exception handling. (alert(null) ‽ console.log(error)); Better than: (x === null ? console.log(error) : alert(x)); EDIT: hey downvotes, let's play funny/not funny .

I can't seem to find the ‽ key on my keyboard.

On Linux with the Compose key enabled, it's Compose, !, ?.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key

Re: Interrobang

#26

Post by Grumbledour »

combatentropy wrote: post #19

Maybe it was because he chose the ugliest of all possibilities. Some of the proposals were ingenious, the two marks combining into a new unity that still retains features of its two parents. But he just laid one mark over the other. It's muddled and mundane. Anyway, we have a convenient convention that works with what we have: lay out the sentence as a question, but end it with the exclamation point. Isn't that a sim…

Yeah, I am with you on that one. I find the symbol at a glance really hard to distinguish from a normal question mark. I do feel there could be a need for the interobang, but it should also stand out more and many of the other suggestions look much more distinct.

Re: Interrobang

#28

Post by thanatos_dem »

As a daily user of the interrobang, I’ve just gotta say, how awesome is this‽

For any aspiring interrobangers, one thing that helps make them easier to use is to set up text replacements. I have replacements setup on my phone and computers to replace “?!” and “!?” with “‽” automatically.

Re: Interrobang

#29

Post by justinator »

hurpaDurpa wrote: post #4

This would really make for a great exception operator, for one-liner exception handling. (alert(null) ‽ console.log(error)); Better than: (x === null ? console.log(error) : alert(x)); EDIT: hey downvotes, let's play funny/not funny .

Do you really want to give Larry Wall any more ideas‽

Re: Interrobang

#30

Post by lostlogin »

kazinator wrote: post #12

> Sometimes, this never-ending string of letters would execute what was called an ox-turn, first reading left to right, then switching to read back from right to left. What a fail! Perfect opportunity missed to use the word "boustrophedon": and in the matching historic context, too.

Having long palindromes would be super helpful in these awful documents.
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