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So am I the only one who calls "-" a tack? As in chmod tack R
Never heard that one before. "dash" or "minus" is all I've ever come across.
* Some Solaris commands use plus and minus to add and subtract things, but a) everyone hates Solaris commands b) this breaks with convention, hence a).
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Never heard that one before. "dash" or "minus" is all I've ever come across.
Minus always annoys me, because it's long and most times (e.g., chmod R )you're never actually minusing anything. * * Some Solaris commands use plus and minus to add and subtract things, but a) everyone hates Solaris commands b) this breaks with convention, hence a).
No reference to {} as mustaches? Three years are a long time.
I've always called them 'curly brackets' which, on reflection, is a little like calling a keyboard a 'typey box'. Funny how long you can do something without really questioning what you're doing!
I work with French programmers, so that opens an entire other can of worms. Colon becomes "two points" and semi-colon becomes "point comma".
As a French speaker it make total sense to me; it just describes it. I just searched quickly how to explain that the semi-colon is somehow half a colon. I couldn't find anything.
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Never heard that one before. "dash" or "minus" is all I've ever come across.
Minus always annoys me, because it's long and most times (e.g., chmod R )you're never actually minusing anything. * * Some Solaris commands use plus and minus to add and subtract things, but a) everyone hates Solaris commands b) this breaks with convention, hence a).
When I first started programming, I didn't know which of the two symbols / or \ was "forward slash" or "back slash", so I got into the habit of calling them "uphill" and "downhill", respectively. I still tend to use those terms when I'm working with people who aren't computer savvy, and those terms tend to be a bit more intuitive and help avoid confusion.
uphill and downhill assume going left to right. forward slash and backslash both assume going left to right. How is this an improvement? Maybe call them right-slash and left-slash, with the lean prefix implied? This would probably help our right to left language friends.
Let me explain: Assume that the slash begins like a pipe |. If the slash has a hinge at the bottom (like most people intuitively assume), then / is "leaning forward" and \ is "leaning back". However, if, when you look at the slash, you assume the hinge is on the top, then it looks like / is "swinging back" and \ is "swinging forward".
So until I figured out where people were putting the "hinge", "back" and "forward" seemed arbitrary. I know it sounds strange, but it was a great source of confusion for me.
Edit: The phrase "lefty loosey, righty tighty" also confused me until I figured out that "left" and "right" were relative to the direction that the top of the screw/bolt moved, not the bottom.
So am I the only one who calls "-" a tack? As in chmod tack R
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| AU | square brackets | parentheses | +----+-----------------+-------------+ :(
Is there nothing commonly called just 'brackets' in Oz?
The sibling post's author thinks that ( ) are brackets.
Clearly there are two different populations here. That's why the need to explicitly specify which "brackets".
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Swedish also has a funny name for the @-sign, named after the trunk of an elephant. In fact, quite a few languages do. Here's a short sample from the Wikipedia article: In Swedish and Danish the sign is known as the "snabel a" (literally trunk a), owning to the resemblance between the sign and the trunk of an elephant. In Norwegian the term most commonly used is "krøllalfa" (literally: curled alpha). In Greek the sig…
And in the Netherlands, we call it a ape's tail (we use 'ape' both for monkeys and ape's.)