From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Tue Mar 23 2004 - 01:15:17 EST
Recently I found an unexpected "Unicode moment" buried in the
documentation for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. This was written by
Bobby Schmidt in 2000.
> The name "C sharp" is really spelled as shown in my column's banner
> graphic: The capital letter C followed by a musical sharp sign.
> Because this sign does not exist in ASCII, most of us approximate the
> name as C#. This approximation leads to witty derivatives such as "C
> hash," "C pound," and the tortuous "C octothorpe"—all based on a
> convenient but incorrect typography. My personal favorite is "D flat,"
> which has the twin virtues of cleverness and correctness, but would
> actually require equally un-ASCII typography.
The "musical sharp sign," of course, is U+266F, making the correct
spelling C♯.
Pronouncing C♯ as "D flat" is musically correct, at least in the
equal-tempered environment, but has the twin disadvantages of (a)
stomping on the name of a library published in Dr. Dobb's Journal during
the early '90s and (b) creating an even worse typography problem. "Db"
would be almost universally pronounced "dee-bee," leading to major
abbreviation-overloading problems in the database world. Only the true
Unicode spelling, D♭, could prevent this.
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
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