You smell like ash, mildew and hash, can barely even speak

[venta]

Last night, ChrisC idly asked me why, on Twitter, hashtags are called hashtags.

Simple, I said, because they start with a #.

But, he said, they're called hashtags in the US, where the # is known as a pound sign.

I have a vague idea that # is sometimes called a pound sign; it's always struck me as a bit odd. I've always assumed it was related to the days when character sets were limited and it was used in place of £.

But of course they're hashtags. After all, they may call it a pound sign, but they don't pronounce it "pound".

But, said ChrisC, they do. In particular, in the US, C programmers talk about "pound defines".

This is just a bit of stray C syntax. Suppose you want your programme to limit the number of available heffalumps to 7, you can keep checking that:

heffalumps < 7

If you're worried that in the future you might want to allow more heffalumps you could do something like this:

#define MAX_HEFFALUMPS 7

and every time you want to check, you can just say:

heffalumps < MAX_HEFFALUMPS

Every time you write MAX_HEFFALUMPS a magical but dumb thing called the preprocessor will slavishly ensure that that gets treated as a 7. As computers improve and can fit more heffalumps in, you can just update it to:

#define MAX_HEFFALUMPS 24

instead of having to change it in lots of different places. This is commonly referred to as a "hash define". Lots of other instructions begin with the # character. See here for more detail than you can possibly want.

I'm sure at least someone will take serious issue with my AA Milne-based description of what the preprocessor does.

Pound defines?

Yes, he says. And pound includes. And pound ifs. And so on.

This is madness. Why wasn't I told? And can they be made to stop it?

And does anyone know why our American friends don't talk of poundtags?

Comments

[mister-jack.livejournal.com]

Ye gods, that's an abomination!

[venta.livejournal.com]

Well, thank goodness at least one other person seems to react appropriately!

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

After all, they may call it a pound sign, but they don't pronounce it "pound".

Sure they do. Haven't you ever been on teleconferences where they tell you to press the pound key and you're so busy wrestling with skype to get it to type in the numbers right that you end up doing it three times? Or is that last part just me not knowing how to operate a phone?

[venta.livejournal.com]

Haven't you ever been on teleconferences

Nope :)

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

Also I work for a USian software company and I've never heard them talking about pound define anything now that I come to think of it.

[venta.livejournal.com]

There is a slim chance that ChrisC was winding me up (in which case, it worked) but he did assumre me he wasn't!

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

I'm just trying to think if there's anyone I can ask in the US who wouldn't think I was crazy for asking (that's rather frowned upon) and I'm drawing a blank. I'll have to wait until one of them is over and we're at the pub and they've had a few beers.

[mrlloyd.livejournal.com]

My US made phone conferencing software asks me to press the pound key.

[phlebas.livejournal.com]

I don't know about limited character sets - I always assumed it was due to a collection of conversations including the line "The pound symbol. You know, the thing above the three." or similar.

'Hashtags' does seem especially odd given they apparently originated with someone who called it a pound sign.

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

I programmed for 2 years in the US, and I think they referred to hash as often as pound.

But then there's caret/twiddle, pling/bang/shriek too

[phlebas.livejournal.com]

Twiddle is tilde rather than caret, shurely?

[venta.livejournal.com]

I thought that.

Everyone knows that one of these ^ is called a hat :)

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

Oops

[venta.livejournal.com]

But then there's caret/twiddle, pling/bang/shriek too

I don't think there's as strong a concensus on those in the UK, though. I wouldn't be surprised by any of those.

Whereas I've never heard a hash define called anything but that.

Actually, very occasionally a preprocessor define, I suppose.

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_sign has lots more names for it, including octothorp!

[venta.livejournal.com]

What a fabulous word.

[phlebas.livejournal.com]

Octothorp-define has a nice ring to it.

[shui-long.livejournal.com]

I have come across "octothorp" in use by typographers, though my font design software calls # "number sign". The unicode character 0023 is officially "# : Number sign = Pound sign, hash, crosshatch, octothorp". Apparently the word "octothorpe" was invented by Bell Labs and is mainly used in the US telephone industry...
And the US uses # as a shorthand for Pound weight, not £ Sterling; it may only be coincidence that American keyboards put the # character on the number "3" key where UK keyboards put the £ character.

[skorpionuk.livejournal.com]

Ah thank you! I knew # as lbs, too... I think it was something odd that my mother did, back in Germany. No idea why.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I was aware of the US 'pound' for '#', I'd not thought it was universal (though I haven't offhand been able to find clear evidence of Americans using 'hash'.)

I did find, in UNIX™ System III's /usr/src/cmd/make/defs, this::

#define POUND   '#'

clear evidence of Americans using 'hash'.

[mejoff.livejournal.com]

http://www.examiner.com/images/blog/EXID25804/images/JimMorrison.jpg

Re: clear evidence of Americans using 'hash'.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

* like *

[ewx.livejournal.com]

C99 includes the following example:

...which suggests that at least the term isn't totally alien to its (substantially American) audience, although of course it's possible that the author of that particular bit was European. I could find no other instance of 'hash' in the entire document - usually they just write "#" (perhaps a compromise l-)

[venta.livejournal.com]

I don't think C99 should be encouraing people to do that sort of thing :)

Interesting also that even while calling it hash_hash, the same (I presume!) writer refers to them as "sharp signs".

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I'd missed the bit about sharp signs.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Caling them sharp signs is trebly confusing/dim, as the sharp sign is quite different.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

"Slightly different" would seem more accurate l-)

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Maybe so, I get quite excitable about typography :-)

[the-alchemist.livejournal.com]

Shall we start a movement to rename '@' the dollar sign?

[venta.livejournal.com]

Ha! That'll fettle them when they're trying to write invoices:

2 @ $2

:)

Also, I have a silly question: were you at the Ignite3 event in Kilburn yesterday evening? Someone who looked very, very like you do in your icons was there, but I bailed on saying "hello" because it seemed like a bit of a long shot :)

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

I'm sure at least someone will take serious issue with my AA Milne-based description

Surely not! Nothing in this world goes together half so well as pooters and heffalumps.

Although FWIW my brain did briefly go into a bit of a spin when I glanced at your post and saw:

heffalumps <

...which probably didn't bother anyone else. My server boots up with:

heffalumps>

...but I eventually worked out what you were actually writing about!

[venta.livejournal.com]

With all due respect, I don't think you should have been reading a note for non-geeks ;p

(Though obviously, the note for geeks does prompt you to read it!)

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

I blame LJ-cut! Once I clicked on it there was no way to tell which parts of the resulting full text I was supposed to read! ;-P

[ulfilias.livejournal.com]

Hmmm....I think the only sensible move is to change to the Euro and then we can all universaly call it the pound sign. <-- I've obviously been at the # again !

[secondhand-rick.livejournal.com]

I've sent a query to a yankee programmer friend.

[secondhand-rick.livejournal.com]

My friend responds:

No idea why its hashtags - maybe there's some brit who has inflitrated twitter. They are everywhere these days it seems. :)

It is most certainly "pound define".

[venta.livejournal.com]

Well, she or he is entitled to that opinion, but it most certainly bloody isn't :)

Thank you for investigating.

[fractalgeek.livejournal.com]

There is also the joy that the language "C Sharp" is usually (including on the cover as a logo) actually written with a hash, not a sharp.

[celestialweasel.livejournal.com]

C Octothope - therefore Cocteau Thorpe, named after John Cocteau and Jeremy Thorpe.

[fractalgeek.livejournal.com]

:-)

There could be a whole new game here, for a certain Sheldon to enjoy..

[floralaetifica.livejournal.com]

This very thing confused me mightily when I was first in Portland. The first time I phoned an automated line and was told to press the pound key I looked at my phone, and scratched my head, and looked ant my phone, and swore. I did eventually figure it out - I guess that perhaps a hash looks a bit like a pound (of the kind you keep animals in) when seen from above, so I tried that.

Can we take the fact that twitter has hashtags as a triumph of the UK? Was it started by people from here? Or perhaps antipodeans, if they also say hash (though generally they seem to use American terminology more than UK).

[nisaba.livejournal.com]

Australians use "hash".

As I understand it, it was the twitter community that started using hashtags, rather than something the twitter company came up with, so it may have come from a hash-using part of the world. But I could be making that up (thought I read it somewhere!)

[serpentstar.livejournal.com]

# is a pound sign not because of limited character sets, but because it's an abbreviation for pounds as a unit of weight. 20# = 20 lb.

[serpentstar.livejournal.com]

(Although personally I'd call it the hash key, at least, when talking to other British people.)

[cardinalsin.livejournal.com]

Let's compromise and call it a waffle sign.

[condign.livejournal.com]

Completely non-expert, and going only by memory, but I think the hash/pound distinction has never been that clear in US computing.

For the most part, we do call it the "pound" key. However, way back in the day, when I was at the Pembroke computer labs trying to download Japanese software, I remember that "hash" was part of the syntax used by old FTP programs. If you toggled the -hash option, a "#" symbol would appear for every block of data transferred. So at least some programmers--presumably US-based--were calling it hash back then. But "pound" is much more common.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb490657.aspx

[emarkienna.livejournal.com]

I asked tiamatlady - she calls it a number sign, and interestingly seemed confused at the idea of it being a pound sign as much as we are. She acknowledged that phones have "pound signs", but apart from that it was a number sign.

She doesn't do programming, so has no idea if there is any consistent convention in the US for its use in that context. She calls the Twitter tags hashtags, simply because that's what they're called.