Character names (Was: Re: Indicating multilevel picks in menus)

[Jim Grey <jwg -at- ACD4 -dot- ACD -dot- COM>]

Fred Jacobson sez:
 Steve Hollander wrote:
 > In a recent posting, Fred Jacobsen mentioned using the pipe [|] and various
 > other characters to make multilevel picks from menus--for example,
 <snip>
 It's interesting that Steve calls the character "pipe."  That is, of
 course, what it symbolizes in Unix shell commands and MSDOS command
 language, but although I have used it as such for _many_ years, I have
 been thinking of it as "stroke" in this context - just a separator with
 no analogical association.

Some of the stuff I document requires the user to use this character.  Since
we develop on UNIX, everyone inside the company calls it a pipe.  But our
customers all have different names for it; I've heard "stroke", but the big
two seem to be "pipe" and "vertical bar".  So we use "pipe", but introduce it
as follows in each discussion it appears:  "Enter a pipe symbol (|).  The
pipe ..."  If this character had a well-known name, we wouldn't bother with
all this.

One of our customers had surprising names for two common characters (and
were upset when we wouldn't change our docs around to use these names):

        *  - splat
        #  - octothorpe (sp?)

We call them "star" and "pound" (though we use pound so infrequently, we
introduce it as "the pound symbol (#)" in each discussion it appears).  This
customer was a local exchange carrier (telephone company) - note that these
two characters are the only symbols on your telephone keypad.  Many other of
our customers are in the phone biz, and they all call these symbols "star"
and "pound".


jim grey
jwg -at- acd4 -dot- acd -dot- com
Terre Haute, IN - The Silicon Cornfield