> By the way, (totally off-topic, of course, my apologies): what do all > y'all call the "@" operator?
Back when the "what syntax should we use for decorators?" debate raged, this symbol was referred to as a "pie", I guess because it looks like the swirl on top of a cream pie. I think this term is of Perl/Unix-y origin, similar to "bang"(!), "splat"(*), and "hash"(#). I much prefer the "spidermonkey" or "sleepycat" terms, though. Unfortunately, here in the US, far fewer would understand what I was saying than if I called it the prosaic "at-sign" (so named because on old-style store receipts, one might find "3 apples @ 5 cents", meaning "at the unit price of" or just "at" for short). Use of "dot" and "star" for "." and "*" are fairly commonplace now, in place of their older forms "period" and "asterisk". Did you ever hear anyone say "go to 'www period google period com'"? But it is interesting that the clunky "ampersand" persists. Perhaps as we move forward into the unicode world, we will have to have more names for symbols like "§" and "¶". My Windows character map names these (when mousing over them) as the "section sign" and "Pilcrow sign". "@" is referred to here as the "Commercial At", and "#" as the "Number sign", although all of us have probably been instructed by voice mail menus to press the "pound key" when they mean this sign. Much more good info on all this trivia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuation. -- Paul Mary love to wear her skates/Upon the ice to frisk/Wasn't she a silly girl/Her little * ? _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
