Re: Character names (Was: Re: Indicating multilevel picks in menus)

[Margaret Redding <ab555 -at- FREENET -dot- CARLETON -dot- CA>]

>Fred Jacobson sez:
> Steve Hollander wrote:
> > In a recent posting, Fred Jacobsen mentioned using the pipe [|] and various
> > other characters to make multilevel picks from menus--for example,
> <snip>
> It's interesting that Steve calls the character "pipe."  That is, of
> course, what it symbolizes in Unix shell commands and MSDOS command
> language, but although I have used it as such for _many_ years, I have
> been thinking of it as "stroke" in this context - just a separator with
> no analogical association.

>Some of the stuff I document requires the user to use this character.  Since
>we develop on UNIX, everyone inside the company calls it a pipe.  But our
>customers all have different names for it; I've heard "stroke", but the big
>two seem to be "pipe" and "vertical bar".  So we use "pipe", but introduce it
>as follows in each discussion it appears:  "Enter a pipe symbol (|).  The
>pipe ..."  If this character had a well-known name, we wouldn't bother with
>all this.

>One of our customers had surprising names for two common characters (and
>were upset when we wouldn't change our docs around to use these names):

>        *  - splat
>        #  - octothorpe (sp?)

octothorp (octo-8, the # has eight points). In Canada we also use this
sign to indicate an apartment number. We call * an asterisk


>We call them "star" and "pound" (though we use pound so infrequently, we
>introduce it as "the pound symbol (#)" in each discussion it appears).  This
>customer was a local exchange carrier (telephone company) - note that these
>two characters are the only symbols on your telephone keypad.  Many other of
>our customers are in the phone biz, and they all call these symbols "star"
>and "pound".


>jim grey
>jwg -at- acd4 -dot- acd -dot- com
>Terre Haute, IN - The Silicon Cornfield



--
Margaret Redding  ab555 -at- freenet -dot- carleton -dot- ca
Ottawa, Ontario
CANADA