Some danish pronunciations:
" = gsejne = goose eyes
{} = tuborgklammer = tuborg braces (as it resembles the old logo of a danish beer brewery named Tuborg)
Hopefully this wonāt mess up the charactersā¦ The first two are the less than and greater than, sometimes referred to as āwakaā.
An ASCII poem:
!*''#
^"`$$-
!=@$_
% ~#4
[]ā¦/
|{,SYSTEM HALTED
The poem can only be appreciated by reading it aloud, to wit:
Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat equal at dollar under-score,
Percent splat waka waka tilde number four,
Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma CRASH.
-matt
I personally pronounce the * as āpointerā when this is its intended meaning, e.g., āint *xā becomes āint-pointer xā. x is, after all, a pointer to an int.
Awesome post. Really made me wonder what I say for each, and more often than not, it was the bold term.
/ are called Obliques too (wellā¦ according to a scottish collegue)
My C++ teacher invented the pronunciation of 'row for = which is also how I pronounce the php - since theyāre basically the same, you just need to know what Iām talking about to know what Iām talking aboutā¦
also for php, the $ is silent in a variable name. Though in Perl you probably should pronounce itāor just never explain Perl to begin with.
To be fair, itās relatively rare that you have to read source code āletter by letterā to someone. As someone above mentioned, if you say āif a equals bā everyone you would possibly say it to would know that itās supposed to mean āif (a == b)ā.
In the few instances of having to dictate a shell script to your mom over the phone, I find it helpful to say āthat key left of the 1 keyā 
quote:
So the next time a programmer walks up to you and says, āoh, itās easy! Just type wax bang at hash buck grapes circumflex and splat waneā, youāll know what they mean.
Sounds like a PERL program.
I think Iām the only one who actually decoded āwax bang at hash buck grapes circumflex and splat waneā:
(!@$%^*)
Again, it depends heavily on the context.
Iāve come around to āparenā and ābraceā over ābracketā and ācurly bracketā (though itās still āsquare bracketā for me) as theyāre easier to say, despite not being terribly British. Iām also slightly disheartened to discover we Britains arenāt meant to say period either, aaah well.
I find I need to find ways of āreading codeā perhaps a little more than most because I find I think best when walking, so I think a lot about code while not at a computer. It rarely comes down to naming symbols though, unless Iām thinking up a new syntax.
As for reading C# lambdas, for something of the form āx = somecodeā I read as āgiven x, somecodeā or if you want to be more expressive āgiven x execute/perform/become somecodeā. Iāve also heard ālambda of x is somecodeā which makes itās role as a form of anonymous function explicit, though one could argue technically itās incorrect. I do remember people on the C# team mentioning how they read it somewhere, but I canāt find it now. Most likely on Channel9.
"Martin said: āThe symbol wich gives me mmore headaches is the ~ symbol, mostly because no one uses it everā¦ā
You must not be an embedded designer."
Or a game player. Tilde is used to bring down the console in Quake based games and many others. It causes a lot of headaches when itās not internationalized properly and on my english keyboard I have to press Shift+# instead of `.
Actually ācedillaā is only used in french and is much different than a comma. Cedilla is the little tail that is added to āCā in this character : āā
In french, comma is āvirguleā and cedilla is ācdilleā.
The funniest ones i heard recently was someone referred to a : (colon) as a ādouble dotā and an apostrophe (ā) as an āup commaā - you couldnāt make it up!
Technically, a sharp sign has two strictly vertical lines and two crossing horizontal lines that rise slightly from left to right. It predates the typewriter symbols by a few centuries.
In casual conversation, the symbol on the keyboard is pretty close, but you wouldnāt want to do something like ā¦ mistake the hash for the sharp symbol when naming your programming language.
#9839; #
Btw,
In Deutsch ist ein ā-ā bitte ein Bindestrich und kein Minus!
@DallonF: No, I did it too. You were just the first to post a comment on it. 
ā!@#$%^*? Thatās amazing! I use the same combination on my luggage!ā
The = is really difficult - just yesterday I tried to tell a colleague some C++ stuff and didnāt know how to call this. Explaining it with āderefencingā seems to be the least bad wayā¦
Btw. for single chars thereās the āasciiā command line tool (http://www.catb.org/~esr/ascii/). And I now noticed that it will even give correct albeit verbose results if you run ā
ascii wax bang at hash buck grapes circumflex and splat waneā on command line 
What, no āwaveā for tilde? I must be extra-rareā¦
When I was in first year I had a C++ professor who had a background in typography. And one day he just went off on a tangent and said āOh, by the way, youāll never be able to guess what ā#ā is actually called.ā Ever since then, Iāve been using the word āoctothorpeā to irritate my friends.
"I think itās more standard to call it āsharpā than people think, as Iāve always heard the first 2 characters of the first line of a *nix shell script (#!/usr/bin/bash or whatever) referred to as āshābangā.
Thatās funny, I never thought of that in terms of the word sharp. The first perl book I ever read called it a hash-bang, and said that it could be shortened to shābang ā the sh deriving from the end of āhash.ā
I guess it works for either.