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Common . Rare: dots; [two-spot]. ; Common: ; semi. Rare: weenie; [hybrid], pit-thwong. < > Common: ; bra/ket; l/r angle; l/r angle bracket; l/r broket. Rare: from/{into, towards}; read from/write to; suck/blow; comes-from/gozinta; in/out; crunch/zap (all from UNIX); tic/tac; [angle/right angle]. = Common: ; gets; takes. Rare: quadrathorpe; [half-mesh]. ? Common: query; ; {ques} . Rare: quiz; whatmark; [what]; wildchar; huh; hook; buttonhook; hunchback. @ Common: at sign; at; strudel. Rare: each; vortex; whorl; [whirlpool]; cyclone; snail; ape; cat; rose; cabbage; . V Rare: [book]. [ ] Common: l/r square bracket; l/r bracket; ; bracket/unbracket. Rare: square/unsquare; [U turn/U turn back]. Common: backslash, hack, whack; escape (from C/UNIX); reverse slash; slosh; backslant; backwhack. Rare: bash; ; reversed virgule; [backslat]. ^ Common: hat; control; uparrow; caret; . Rare: xor sign, chevron; [shark (or shark-fin)]; to the ('to the power of'); fang; pointer (in Pascal). _ Common: ; underscore; underbar; under. Rare: score; backarrow; skid; [flatworm]. ' Common: backquote; left quote; left single quote; open quote; ; grave. Rare: backprime; [backspark]; unapostrophe; birk; blugle; back tick; back glitch; push; ; quasiquote. { } Common: o/c brace; l/r brace; l/r squiggly; l/r squiggly bracket/brace; l/r curly bracket/brace; . Rare: brace/unbrace; curly/uncurly; leftit/rytit; l/r squirrelly; [embrace/bracelet]. A balanced pair of these may be called curlies . | Common: bar; or; or-bar; v-bar; pipe; vertical bar. Rare: ; gozinta; thru; pipesinta (last three from UNIX); [spike]. ~ Common: ; squiggle; {twiddle} ; not. Rare: approx; wiggle; swung dash; enyay; [sqiggle (sic)]. The pronunciation of # as 'pound' is common in the U.S. but a bad idea; {Commonwealth Hackish} has its own, rather more apposite use of 'pound sign' (confusingly, on British keyboards the £ happens to replace #; thus Britishers sometimes call # on a U.S.-ASCII keyboard 'pound', compounding the American error). The U.S. usage derives from an old-fashioned commercial practice of using a # suffix to tag pound weights on bills of lading. The character is usually pronounced 'hash' outside the U.S. There are more culture wars over the correct pronunciation of this character than any other, which has led to the {ha ha only serious} suggestion that it be pronounced "shibboleth" (see Judges 12:6 in an Old Testament or Tanakh). The 'uparrow' name for circumflex and 'leftarrow' name for underline are historical relics from archaic ASCII (the 1963 version), which had these graphics in those character positions rather than the modern punctuation characters. The 'swung dash' or 'approximation' sign (?1) is not quite the same as tilde ~ in typeset material, but the ASCII tilde serves for both (compare {angle brackets}). Some other common usages cause odd overlaps. The #, $, >, and & characters, for example, are all pronounced "hex" in different communities because various assemblers use them as a prefix tag for hexadecimal constants (in particular, # in many assembler-programming cultures, $ in the 6502 world, > at Texas Instruments, and & on the BBC Micro, Sinclair, and some Z80 machines). See also {splat}. The inability of ASCII text to correctly represent any of the world's other major languages makes the designers' choice of 7 bits look more and more like a serious {misfeature} as the use of international networks continues to increase (see {software rot}). Hardware and software from the U.S. still tends to embody the assumption that ASCII is the universal character set and that characters have 7 bits; this is a major irritant to people who want to use a character set suited to their own languages. Perversely, though, efforts to solve this problem by proliferating 'national' character sets produce an evolutionary pressure to use a smaller subset common to all those in use.
C n. 1. The third letter of the English alphabet. 2. ASCII 1000011. 3. The name of a programming language designed by Dennis Ritchie during the early 1970s and immediately used to reimplement {Unix}; so called because many features derived from an earlier compiler named 'B' in commemoration of its parent, BCPL. (BCPL was in turn descended from an earlier Algol-derived language, CPL.) Before Bjarne Stroustrup settled the question by designing {C++}, there was a humorous debate over whether C's successor should be named 'D' or 'P'. C became immensely popular outside Bell Labs after about 1980 and is now the dominant language in systems and microcomputer applications programming. C is often described, with a mixture of fondness and disdain varying according to the speaker, as "a language that combines all the elegance and power of assembly language with all the readability and maintainability of assembly language" See also {languages of choice}, {indent style}. [ansi-c.png] The Crunchly on the left sounds a little ANSI.
C Programmer's Disease n. The tendency of the undisciplined C programmer to set arbitrary but supposedly generous static limits on table sizes (defined, if you're lucky, by constants in header files) rather than taking the trouble to do proper dynamic storage allocation. If an application user later needs to put 68 elements into a table of size 50, the afflicted programmer reasons that he or she can easily reset the table size to 68 (or even as much as 70, to allow for future expansion) and recompile. This gives the programmer the comfortable feeling of having made the effort to satisfy the user's (unreasonable) demands, and often affords the user multiple opportunities to explore the marvelous consequences of {fandango on core}. In severe cases of the disease, the programmer cannot comprehend why each fix of this kind seems only to further disgruntle the user.
C&C . [common, esp. on news.admin.net-abuse.email] Contraction of "Coffee & Cats". This frequently occurs as a warning label on USENET posts that are likely to cause you to {snarf} coffee onto your keyboard and startle the cat off your lap.
C++ /C'·pluhs·pluhs/, n. Designed by Bjarne Stroustrup of AT&T Bell Labs as a successor to {C}. Now one of the {languages of choice}, although many hackers still grumble that it is the successor to either Algol 68 or Ada (depending on generation), and a prime example of {second-system effect}. Almost anything that can be done in any language can be done in C++, but it requires a {language lawyer} to know what is and what is not legal -- the design is almost too large to hold in even hackers' heads. Much of the {cruft} results from C++'s attempt to be backward compatible with C. Stroustrup himself has said in his retrospective book The Design and Evolution of C++ (p. 207), "Within C++, there is a much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out." [Many hackers would now add "Yes, and it's called {Java}" --ESR] [fortran.png] Nowadays we say this of C++.
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