From: Benjamin Peterson (ben@jbrowse.com)
Date: Tue Mar 23 2004 - 06:29:28 EST
On Tue, 23 Mar 2004 11:56:52 +0100, "Philippe Verdy" <verdy_p@wanadoo.fr>
said:
> 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).
The file extension is '.cs', since including punctuation marks would
cause problems on many systems.
The correct spelling is with a sharp sign, not a number sign, as
documented by Microsoft themselves in various places:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vcsharp/productinfo/faq/default.aspx
>
> 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?
See above.
A simple Google search before posting can be a wise move.
-- Benjamin Peterson bjsp123@imap.cc
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