[TUHS] Slashes (was: MS-DOS)

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Nemo <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:
 |On 7 July 2016 at 01:02, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:
 |> On Friday,  1 July 2016 at 21:13:00 -0400, Steve Nickolas wrote:
 |>> On Fri, 1 Jul 2016, Norman Wilson wrote:
 |>>
 |>>> I suspect Yanks being pedantic about `slash' versus `forward slash'
 |>>> would give an Englishman a stroke.
 |>>>
 |>>> If that's too oblique for some of you, I can't help.
 |>>
 |>> I think the proper term is "Virgule" anyway. ;)
 |>
 |> For some definition of "proper".  But it's doubly ambiguous: it's the
 |> French word for comma, and OED states:
 |>
 |>    A thin sloping or upright line (/, |) occurring in mediæval MSS. as
 |>    a mark for the cæsura or as a punctuation-mark (frequently with the
 |>    same value as the modern comma).
 |
 |On the other hand, the OED has the following.
 |
 |slash 5. A thin sloping line, thus /
 |
 |solidus 2. A sloping line used to separate shillings from pence, as 12/6,
 |in writing fractions, and for other separations of figures and letters; a
 |shilling-mark.
 |
 |I would argue "solidus" is closer.

SOLIDUS is the Unicode name, too, as is REVERSE SOLIDUS, giving
SLASH and BACKSLASH as secondaries.
To the contrary, the POSIX standard, says "Slash Character
(<slash>)" and then states "also known as solidus" in the
description, and ditto does so for reverse solidus.  Maybe this
will change over time to better reflect ISO 10646.

--steffen