Survey posted 2004-09-06 15:45 by Jon.

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So, what do you think we talk about? :P

I don't know, but you were a little too excited when you made this poll. The phrase "excessive use of '!'" comes to mind....

-W-

hehe, I didn't notice that until you said so :-)

it's called an exclamation mark, fyi

It is called a short cut. Sweet, Jesus, you need to calm down.

-W-

Oh, and I was trying to calculate factorial. I kept getting "1" by the way, something to do with the variables being "0"...

120d, Of COURSE it's going to be zero, unless you have all your variables set to some non-zero value. Did you really expect otherwise? Haha...

Or, in the programmer's world, a "bang."

Really? I've never heard that before! I always called it an exclamation mark, a factorial, or in some cases, "not."

Unless you're programming TI-BASIC, then "!" is never factorial (I don't think it is anyway). It is also an "i" if you use it like this: "R!OT" I saw a TV show or something with that name... ;) j/k

I mean, as a programmer, I call it a factorial for usage in math (and sometimes in grammar too, just to confuse people). I didn't even think of using it in programming, like for TI-BASIC. You're right, I bet it's the only language that uses the "bang" (lol) as a factorial.

Heh, do they have ¡ for Spanish TI-BASIC? ;-) ¿Huh?

:5->A
:¡A!->A
:Disp A

Perhaps it's just "bang" in certain programming languages or environments. At school I use a lot of OpenBSD and use vi and stuff. The command to exit without saving in vi is :q! and pronounced by my tech overseer as "colon-q-bang." Also, at the beginning of every Perl script is the line #!/usr/bin/perl and he calls the first 2 characters in that line "hash-bang."

It's like a whole other language. Oh wait, it is.

Hmm... in the Barry Trotter books, the symbol on his head, a ?! (or is it !?) is referred to as an interrobang - interro for the ? and bang for the !
I've also heard ! (in the maths version) called shriek or factorial. Usually it's just called the exponential (not to be confused with 10^)

I thought the #!user/local/bin/perl line was called the shebang line? (Heh, who knew William Hung was so technologically inclined? "Shebang! Shebang! Perl scripts start with Shebang!"...sorry.)

Just a hunch, but shebang and hash-bang aren't that different; prolly an attempt by lazy programmers to trash the extra sylable(sp?)...Or maybe they just didn't want to find it funny. (Sorry, bad joke, I'm full of 'em today, apparentally.)

You are abolutely right - I forgot about that. #! is called shebang, and it did come from hashbang. Programmers are lazy. Heck, that's probably why ! is called a bang rather than "exclamation mark." That's dropping, what, 4 syllables?

Programmer laziness has led to great stuff, like functions and bangs and even that nifty feature of the X Window System where you just roll the mouse over a window to focus on it.

Dude, laziness rules. See, that's the problem with all them Microsoft folks; they work too hard.

Working hard never gets anything done. *pops open another mountain dew and delays homework another couple weeks* :)

What's really fun to pronounce is "#!/bin/bash": hash bang slash bin slash bash. :)

There's even a poem that uses different names of symbols:

<>!*''#
^@`$$-
!*'$_
%*<>#4
&)../
|{~~SYSTEM HALTED

Transliterated:
Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret at back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat tick dollar under-score,
Percent splat waka waka number four,
Ampersand right-paren dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket tilde tilde CRASH.

BTW, the "#!" at the beginning of the first line tells *nix systems which program is used as the interpreter of the file (in case you didn't know). You could even use "#!/bin/less" so you can view a text file just by running it.

120d//!!!!

That poem was so good, I saved it to a text file. :-D

"Vertical-bar?" What happened to "pipe?"

Woah. I would not have even thought to call it a bang. No offence to anyone, but I would never have thought it to be commonly known enough to get any response.

-W-

It's sometimes called an "upside-down Coke bottle" too (some glyphs of the bang mark are fat and look like a Coke bottle).

Lol...

No kidding.

Mostly server maintenance, I would think, but probably also calcs, just like any other calc nerds. Not that I really would know (or *want* to know)... :-)

Actually, no. Mostly its how we can come up with a new way of posting Magnus' picture with the thong again. :-)

120d Please do!!! I joined after the "fake ticalc.org store" news article, so I missed a classic... :-(

Oh man, did you miss it...that with the V400 (simultaneously!) were the best April Fool's articles ever to grace the home page of ticalc.org. Please figure out another way, guys!

Wait...that was kinda wrong now that I think about it...

Haha! Yeah, it was wrong... but that's what made it so funny! I remember one where they said they were going to make you pay for each download (and each click, 120d\!). And didn't ticalc.org get fake ads at one point?

Exactly! Being wrong is what makes it so good!!! (like This Is Spinal Tap, Monty Python, Wayne's World, etc.)

I heard about that! A loooong time ago there was a fake article that said ticalc.org was putting up Casio ads to support the site (maybe HP ads - I can't remember). Looked pretty funny, especially since the comments were from lots of gullible angry members.

Yeah! And I think other people even submitted their own ads because they wanted to get some traffic for their sites! 120d

Well, everybody and their brother talks about politics. And since it is a website dealing with calculators, they must talk about those and server maintenance, too.

Calculators and politics. That's my guess. :-P

Are you going to show the correct answer near the end of the poll?