Punctuation

[bb43]

in my quest to find what the heck this symbol is called--> |
(still haven't figured that one out)

I stumbled upon this Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation
then briefly fantasized about a world that had a standard accepted method to denote irony or sarcasm. Then came here. hmmm


also the interrobang (‽) might be my new favorite charater

edit: apparently its called a vertical bar.

[migopod]

I've always heard it called a "pipe" or vertical bar.

[wdragon007]

I've always called them a pipe since that was what they were referred to back in the DOS days.

[Gav]

Yeah it's pipe and i'm pretty sure it predates dos.

What sort of crap world needs punctuation for irony?

[jeff]

Of course it predates DOS - it's a feature DOS lifted (clumsily and imperfectly) from Unix... DOS pipes aren't pipes, they're leaky garden hose!

[migopod]

Of course it predates DOS - it's a feature DOS lifted (clumsily and imperfectly) from Unix... DOS pipes aren't pipes, they're leaky garden hose!

First Use?

[purplejackelope]

Where'd you find the interrobang on the keyboard?

[bb43]

on a mac i go to edit/special characters (command+alt+t) and select it under punctuation
on a PC I Google interrobang then copy paste

[Sean Butler]

Of course it predates DOS - it's a feature DOS lifted (clumsily and imperfectly) from Unix... DOS pipes aren't pipes, they're leaky garden hose!

Nah it definitely predates Unix. Certainly Unix shells used it first to mean a pipe, but the first use is probably in mathematics |x| is absolute value of x.

[jeff]

Of course.... What I meant was that pipes predate DOS, not the vertical bar.

[wdragon007]

What sort of crap world needs punctuation for irony?

The same crap world that has decided that "i c u l8r" is a valid sentence and you're stupid if you don't understand it?

[wdragon007]

I don't know what's a scarier thought -- that we all know what DOS is or the fact that a large number of people nowadays don't.

[Inquartata]

It's the first part of the name of a fencing grip, why wouldn't we know it?

[migopod]

It's the first part of the name of a fencing grip, why wouldn't we know it?

More importantly it's the first part of the name of an illegal fencing grip, and thus is talked about more often than it might otherwise be.

[Lady Quindecim]

I don't know what's a scarier thought -- that we all know what DOS is or the fact that a large number of people nowadays don't.

A large number of people not knowing what DOS is is like the large number of people who do not realize that cheese is an animal product - disappointing, but not surprising.
A *NIX person equating DOS with Microsoft is sad. DOS - which was the OS of an early, 60's IBM mainframe - may pre-date UNIX‽ MS-DOS came later. So did PC-DOS, Commodore DOS, DR-DOS, Atari DOS, FreeDOS, AmigaDOS, and, yes Apple DOS.

Some people forget what is really under the covers. =^_^=

Long live the command shell!

(The interrobang is common in chess notation. I did not know that.)

[wdragon007]

A large number of people not knowing what DOS is is like the large number of people who do not realize that cheese is an animal product - disappointing, but not surprising.

Yeah, not surprising unfortunately. Considering I live in a country where people don't know that Chicken of the Sea is actually a fish, buffalos really don't have wings and Europe isn't a country whose national language is French. Such as, the Iraq and the Asian countries. Such as, and.

Commodore DOS

SYS 64738

Bonus geek points if you actually remember what that is.

[jeff]

A *NIX person equating DOS with Microsoft is sad. DOS - which was the OS of an early, 60's IBM mainframe - may pre-date UNIX‽ MS-DOS came later. So did PC-DOS, Commodore DOS, DR-DOS, Atari DOS, FreeDOS, AmigaDOS, and, yes Apple DOS.

Some people forget what is really under the covers. =^_^=

I haven't forgotten I worked my way through college as a systems programmer (my school was too poor to hire grownups) on DOS/360 and OS/360, and worked on mainframes for much of my career.

I was burned by young 'un ignorance on this with one of my books: the copy-editor systematically replaced mainframe terms with PC ones, eg: replacing "DOS/360" and "OS/360" with "MS-DOS" and "OS/2", etc. I had to write to the publisher saying "the book is unpublishable now because of these mistakes. Either undo the changes or cancel the book." Fortunately they did. Darned copy-editors...

shameless plug department: I have a new book on virtualization coming out this fall

[parrythis]

I haven't forgotten

I had forgotten, but you are correct - DOS (a.k.a. "Disk Operating System", which contrasted with the previous systems that loaded programs and data exclusively from tape) was an IBM-360 operating system back in the '70s and '60s. I recall that programs were executed with JCL (Job Control Language), which had commands that started with a "//", and it took roughly 4 punched cards to define the location of a file on disk and link it (//LFD - Logical File Descriptor?) to the name of the file that the program used.

But back to the question at hand.

Doing a Google search I found the following:

"Verticle Bar" - Which is pretty much what it is, plain and simple.

"Pipe" - which refers to how the symbol is used in UNIX scripts to denote the redirection of one command's output to another command's input, as if through a "pipe".

"Or" - Which refers to mathematical and logic notation that uses that symbol to denote an "or" condition between two expressions.


If you are looking for a name for it that is not very context-specific, I would go with "verticle bar".

[Sean Butler]

(The interrobang is common in chess notation. I did not know that.)

Not exactly. The interrobang is an exclamation mark superimposed over the top of a question mark.

‽

Chess uses the ? and ! in annotating chess notation. !? means an interesting move and ?! means a dubious move. E.G.

1. e4 e5
2. f3?! <-- probably not the best. Some might even say white is already worse and give this move a "?".

or

1. e4 e5
2. Nf3 f5!? <-- analysis of this is extremely complex and tactical.

To my knowledge the interrobang has never been used in chess annotation and I doubt it will since it lacks the distinction between "bad with a chance of being good (?!)" or "good with a chance of being bad (!?)."

[Lady Quindecim]

But I read it on the interwebz! It HAS to be true. Everything on the interwebz is true because it is made of cats.
I was wondering what it was all about there. That is interesting and clearly requires distinction.