It’s probably useful to note that much of the usage of these characters and the terms for them came about (a) in the U.S., and (b) in the Unix culture (which includes shell and C and Perl programming cultures, predating the rise of Python and Ruby and C#).
This is why the solution to Marius Gundersen’s problem is to get an American keyboard for programming. It’s also why there’s so much apparent ignorance of non-U.S. usage of these terms or characters in the list.
And I’m amused at all the references to Ruby terminology that actually originated in Perl, such as the “spaceship” operator.
It should probably be noted that all of these symbols have typographical names that are standardized. It’s true that an “exclamation point” can be used in some languages as the logical “not” operand, for example… but that doesn’t change the name of the symbol itself.
One need only refer to a typographic specification / font specification to learn the names of those symbols. (BTW, some of the names given above refer to a different symbol tha the one pictured – a cedilla, for example, is nothing like a comma).
Also, there’s a difference between a hyphen, a dash, and a minus sign – functionally and typographically. On a keyboard, they may be one and the same, but software that deals with typography will differentiate (in fact, there are different “dashes” of different sizes intended for different purposes; look up “emdash”).
! # not , bang
@ # at, ampersand
$ # dollar
[] # square brackets
() # brackets
{} # curlies, curly brackets
` # back tick
"" # double quote
’ # single quote
| # pipe
# asterix, star
left angle bracket, right angle bracket
In perl there are operators that have identical pronunciation, eg “==” and “eq” which differ by the context they give to. Both pronounced equals.
I rarely pronounce symbols them the same unless I’m actually dictating. Usually, when paring or discussing code, it’s just a matter of describing the intent or effect.
In some regions of the United States and Canada, the symbol is traditionally called the pound sign, but in others, the number sign. This derives from a series of abbreviations for pound, which is a unit of weight. At first “lb.” was used; however, printers later designed a font containing a special symbol of an “lb” with a line through the ascenders so that the lowercase letter “l” would not be mistaken for the number “1”. Unicode character U+2114 (#8468;) is called the “LB Bar Symbol”, and it is a cursive development of this symbol. Ultimately, there was the reduction to a combination of two horizontal strokes (cf. skewed “=”) and two forward-slash-like strokes (cf. “//”).
@Rod: As for how to pronounce the ‘lambda’ symbol = in C# 3.0, MSDN says it’s pronounced as “goes to”, which I never really grokked. Anyone care to explain?
–snip–
x = x * x;
The lambda expression x = x * x is read “x goes to x times x.”
–snip–