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('3-1/2'). The major motive here is probably that the former are more readable in a monospaced font, together with a desire to avoid the risk that the latter might be read as 'three minus one-half'. The decimal form is definitely preferred for fractions with a terminating decimal representation; there may be some cultural influence here from the high status of scientific notation. |
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Another on-line convention, used especially for very large or very small numbers, is taken from C (which derived it from FORTRAN). This is a form of 'scientific notation' using 'e' to replace '*10^'; for example, one year is about 3e7 seconds (that is, 3 × 107 seconds) long. |
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The tilde (~) is commonly used in a quantifying sense of 'approximately'; that is, '~50' means about fifty. |
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On Usenet and in the MUD world, common C boolean, logical, and relational operators such as '|', '&', '| |', '&&', '!', '= =', '!=', '>', '<' '>=', and '=<' are often combined with English. The Pascal not-equals, '<>', is also recognized, and occasionally one sees '/=' for not-equals (from Ada, Common Lisp, and Fortran 90). The use of prefix '!' as a loose synonym for 'not-' or 'no-' is particularly common; thus, '!clue' is read 'no-clue' or 'clueless'. |
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A related practice borrows syntax from preferred programming languages to express ideas in a natural-language text. For example, one might see the following: |
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In <jrh678689@@thudpucker.com> J. R. Hacker wrote:
I recently had occasion to field-test the Snafu
Systems 2300E adaptive gonkulator. The price was
right, and the racing stripe on the case looked
kind of neat, but its performance left something
to be desired. |
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Yeah, I tried one out too. |
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#ifdef FLAME
Hasn't anyone told those idiots that you can't get
decent bogon suppression with AFJ filters at today's
net volumes?
#endif /* FLAME */ |
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I guess they figured the price premium for true
frame-based semantic analysis was too high.
Unfortunately, it's also the only workable approach.
I wouldn't recommend purchase of this product unless
you're on a *very* tight budget. |
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