From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Tue Mar 23 2004 - 05:56:52 EST
From: "Doug Ewell" <dewell@adelphia.net>
> 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♯.
But the "orthograph" is unambiguously "C#" with ASCII characters at least for
its standard source file extension, not "C♯", so the correct spelling should be
"C number sign" (or spelled in French "C croisillon", or more commonly "C dièse"
even though it is the French spelling for the sharp musical symbol).
I wonder how Microsoft came to the conclusion to use the "#" cymbol which causes
problems in various shell environments, including make scripts. Is it an attempt
to exclude its language from Unix and Mac environments where these names would
be impractical to use as file extensions?
Which would be an alternate file extension:
- ".cns" (for "C number sign")?
- ".cn" (for "C.Net")?
- ".csh" is already excluded (it's the extension for C-Shell scripts, popular on
Unix).
- ".csharp" if it's the spelled name that Microsoft wants to use to name its
language?
- ".csp" ?
- ".chocolate", playing on the analogy with the Java's coffea cup? ;-(
- ".ch" (for "C Hash") seems best for me...
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