From: David T-G

Sent: 09 February 2022 13:42

...and then Wols Lists said...
%
% On 08/02/2022 15:21, Paul Menzel wrote:
...
%
% As commented elsewhere, for the sake of us ENGLISH speakers,
% *PLEASE* make that $(hash). A pound sign is £.

Or, even better, $(octothorpe) since that's merely a symbol rather than a
food product or a result of an algorithm on data.  You might even hope
that we hash this out eventually ...

I was more worried that people might think we should smoke the hash.

The # symbol called 'hash' in the UK. Can't remember why - but it is used
to mean 'number'.

'octothorpe' is some brain-damaged name and should be shot^Werased on sight.

The whole UK v US confusion about what a 'pound' sign looks like almost
certainly led to UK ascii using the £ glyph for 0x23.
I can imaging a phone call where a US person said '0x23 is the pound sign'.

I remember problems with ascii peripherals on a ebcdic mainframe where
£ $ # and \ had to get squeezed into the three available codes.
Not only was in semi-random what a line printer might print,
we had 'page mode' terminals where the input and output translation
tables didn't always match.

	David

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