Slashes and backslashes

Greetings:

OK, this is stolen from Wikipedia. And I do not believe it is complete. "A 
slash or stroke, / , is a punctuation mark. It is also called a solidus, 
oblique, diagonal, separatrix, shilling mark, virgule, scratch comma, 
slant, or forward slash." However, having worked in 
typography/proofreading, I know that a solidus and a virgule are supposed 
to be two different things (not on a computer keyboard, though).

Also according to Wiki, the corresponding character (symbol, or glyph), 
the \ , was invented in 1960 for computer use. It does not have a full 
complement of names as the slash does, just "backslash" or "reverse 
solidus." No doubt some attempting to appear learned have back-formed 
names like "reverse oblique."...

Lastly and leastly, one cannot properly "want to be pedantic." If it is 
intentional, it is not pedantic, at least not *to you*. If, however, one 
takes great pride in attention to detail, *others* ... Well. Perhaps I 
should wrap this up.

Darrell

Darrell A. Martin  -  630-754-2187
Manager, Computer Operations
dmartin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote on 07/27/2006 07:47:17 AM:

On 27/07/2006, at 10:31 PM, AGlauser@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

This is a slash:            /
This is a backslash:  \

If you REALLY want to be pedantic:

   / is a solidus
   \ is a reverse-solidus

Regards,
Simon Coulter

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