in Germany, I heard for the @-sign Klammeraffe (clinging monkey) and for # Zaun (fence) - although from someone not familiar with PCs and/or programming
Funny no one has mentioned ==
Oddly enough everybody I know simply says this as ‘Equals’ though I suppose I’m the odd ball since when reading this aloud I say, “equates to”.
“Really you should consult a dictionary and find out which is the ‘correct’ answer for each symbol. This may not reflect common usage in the computing industry, but that’s normal for all forms of language.”
Ah, the rancid smell of naive linguistic prescriptivism - one of the hallmarks of the true unreconstructed geek. And where on the autism spectrum are you, little boy?
In the Gries and Schneider book, “A Logical Approach to Discrete Math”, There is a lengthy footnote where one of the authors relates a funny story about how he was giving a lecture, and pronouncing both the assignment operator and the boolean equivalence operator as “equals”, when a voice piped up from the back saying “becomes!”. The entertaining story has caused me to pronounce them distinctly ever since.
To avoid the ambiguities of “equals”, I pronounce these two as:
= “becomes”
== “equivales”
When there is a misunderstanding, I often have to switch back to the lenghty C++ operator names:
= “member access operator” (informally “arrow”)
“insertion operator” (binary left shift)
“extraction operator” (binary right shift)
Which I must admit is a mouthful. Somehow it stuck.
Or much better, we should select tje funniest names and start using them…
Or even better, use different varieties in the same context. Let us confuse 'em