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about 1993 it has been reinforced by the HTML markup used on the World Wide Web. |
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Angle-bracket enclosure is also used to indicate that a term stands for some random member of a larger class (this is straight from BNF). Examples like the following are common: |
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So this ethnic walks into a bar one day |
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There is also an accepted convention for 'writing under erasure'; the text |
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Be nice to this fool^H^H^H^Hgentleman,
he's visiting from corporate HQ. |
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reads roughly as "Be nice to this fool, er, gentleman ". This comes from the fact that the digraph ^H is often used as a print representation for a backspace. It parallels (and may have been influenced by) the ironic use of 'slashouts' in science-fiction fanzines. |
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A related habit uses editor commands to signify corrections to previous text. This custom is fading as more mailers get good editing capabilities, but one occasionally still sees things like this: |
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I've seen that term used on alt.foobar often.
Send it to Erik for the File.
Oops s/Erik/Eric/. |
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The s/Erik/Eric/ says "change Erik to Eric in the preceding". This syntax is borrowed from the Unix editing tools ed and sed, but is widely recognized by non-Unix hackers as well. |
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In a formula, * signifies multiplication but two asterisks in a row are a shorthand for exponentiation (this derives from FORTRAN). Thus, one might write 2 ** 8 = 256. |
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Another notation for exponentiation one sees more frequently uses the caret (^, ASCII 1011110); one might write instead 2^8 = 256. This goes all the way back to Algol-60, which used the archaic ASCII 'up-arrow' that later became the caret; this was picked up by Kemeny and Kurtz's original BASIC, which in turn influenced the design of the bc(1) and dc(1) Unix tools, which have probably done most to reinforce the convention on Usenet. The notation is mildly confusing to C programmers, because '^' means bitwise exclusive-or in C. Despite this, it was favored 3:1 over ** in a late-1990 snapshot of Usenet. It is used consistently in this lexicon. |
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In on-line exchanges, hackers tend to use decimal forms or improper fractions ('3.5' or '7/2') rather than 'typewriter style' mixed fractions |
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