It's a bit like how a lot of people refer to '#' as 'hashtag' these days, without knowing about 'the pound symbol' or 'sharp' (if you are a musician). :)
It's a different symbol than the sharp, and I don't blame anyone for not knowing it's rarely used for that purpose these days.
I had a web design professor who said its "true" name was octothorpe, and while various sources confirm that, I've never heard anyone else call it that. Another student in the same class once called it the "tic tac toe symbol."
Ok, the true pedants can tilt their head a little to see the difference between a # and a [Edit: Hmm it seems HN doesn't support pasting of extended characters such as the musical 'sharp'?!?]...
I will have to change the pronunciation in my C# programming books to 'C-hash' instead of 'C-sharp'... :)
I think you're missing the point. There's the shape and there's the symbol.
An octagon is a shape. A stop sign is a symbol that happens to be an octagon. Inversely, an octagon in the context of street signs represents "stop."
The octothorpe, used in music, represents "sharp." In front of a number it represents "pound." In front of a string on twitter it represents "hashtag."
AFAIK the typographical/visual differences are basically irrelevant. It's just a different symbol with a different meaning in different contexts, all represented with the same shape.
In my opinion the sharp symbol is very different from the hash symbol #. If you argue that these two are the same symbol, then so would be "d" and "q".
> In my opinion the sharp symbol is very different from the hash symbol #.
Yes, the pound sign is different than the sharp symbol, just as single quotes are different than apostrophes, and guillemets are different than less-than and greater-than symbols, and the flat symbol is different than "b".
Now, limitations of first common US typewriters and then the ASCII character set have led to conventions where some of these have been used in place of the other because the correct symbol wasn't available, but that's different than the symbols being the same, and in most modern contexts, the correct symbol is usually available.
But I'm guessing that you've figured out after reading your own comment that the musical sharp symbol is not rendered in all mediums (including HN). Were I required to search for reference material related to Microsoft's C-like language using proper typography, I'd have to go cut-and-paste the symbol from a WikiPedia page because I don't know how to get it from keyboard to textfield otherwise.
IMO, yeah, maybe not the best choice by MSFT. But pragmatically, we all know what "#" means in that context even if it's not correct. All the Monday-morning-quarterbacking in the world isn't going to change that. So I'm as all for an academic discussion as the next person, but that's all it is.
Where I'm from (UK) this has always been called the "hash" symbol. Although British Telecom voice prompts insisted on calling it the "square" key for a while.
To hash means to chop up, which is a possible origin. To [cross] hatch means to colour in a space with [crossed] parallel lines, which is also possible.
"Pound symbol" always confuses me. £ is the symbol for Pound sterling, and on UK keyboards that's at the same place (shift-3) as the # is on the US keyboards that we use in the Netherlands.
It's as if people who call # the pound sign are from the UK and typed shift-3 on someone else's keyboard without actually noticing what showed up on the screen.
# after the number is widely understood to refer to pounds (as in weight) in the US. Not sure how common that use is these days but most people would understand what was meant if they saw it.
A symbol that, after many decades of living in the U. S., I'm seeing for the first time just today. In my experience, if it's not written as "lb." or "lbs.", a hash is often used: "#".
I have to admit that possibility did cross my mind shortly after I posted my sibling comment. That said, I've never actually seen it used that way (only ever "lb")
It has always been called hash in some regions/contexts. I'm pretty sure the shape itself (i.e. regardless of context) is called an octothorpe. So no it's not at all like that.
It's a hash, not a hashtag. The hashtag is the # plus a "tag" word. When someone says "hashtag foo", they went spelling it out
# + foo,
they are saying "this is a hashtag, not a regular word in my setencen; the tag is foo" and the # is silent.
