7 Jul
2016
7 Jul
'16
8:18 p.m.
Nemo <cym224(a)gmail.com> wrote:
|On 7 July 2016 at 01:02, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog(a)lemis.com> wrote:
|> On Friday, 1 July 2016 at 21:13:00 -0400, Steve Nickolas wrote:
|>> On Fri, 1 Jul 2016, Norman Wilson wrote:
|>>
|>>> I suspect Yanks being pedantic about `slash' versus `forward
slash'
|>>> would give an Englishman a stroke.
|>>>
|>>> If that's too oblique for some of you, I can't help.
|>>
|>> I think the proper term is "Virgule" anyway. ;)
|>
|> For some definition of "proper". But it's doubly ambiguous:
it's the
|> French word for comma, and OED states:
|>
|> A thin sloping or upright line (/, |) occurring in mediæval MSS. as
|> a mark for the cæsura or as a punctuation-mark (frequently with the
|> same value as the modern comma).
|
|On the other hand, the OED has the following.
|
|slash 5. A thin sloping line, thus /
|
|solidus 2. A sloping line used to separate shillings from pence, as 12/6,
|in writing fractions, and for other separations of figures and letters; a
|shilling-mark.
|
|I would argue "solidus" is closer.
SOLIDUS is the Unicode name, too, as is REVERSE SOLIDUS, giving
SLASH and BACKSLASH as secondaries.
To the contrary, the POSIX standard, says "Slash Character
(<slash>)" and then states "also known as solidus" in the
description, and ditto does so for reverse solidus. Maybe this
will change over time to better reflect ISO 10646.
--steffen