(@) At.16:45 Apr 07 2010
Times Read: 933
Today's Symbol of the day (@) called the at sign or at symbol, is an abbreviation of the word at or the phrase at the rate of in accounting and commercial invoices, e.g. "7 widgets @ $2 = $14".
@ is used in various programming languages although there is not a consistent theme to its usage. For example:
In C#, it denotes "verbatim strings", where no characters are escaped and two double-quote characters represent a single double-quote. As a prefix it also allows keywords to be used as identifiers.
In Java, it is used to denote annotations, a kind of metadata, since version 5.0
In modal logic, specifically when representing possible worlds, @ is sometimes used as a logical symbol to denote the actual world (the world we are 'at').
In Pascal, @ is the "address of" operator (it tells the location at which a variable is found).
In Perl, @ prefixes variables which contain arrays.
In PHP, it is used just before an expression to make the interpreter suppress errors that would be generated from that expression.
In Python 2.4 and up, it is used to decorate a function (wrap the function in another one at creation time).
In Ruby, @ prefixes instance variables, and @@ prefixes class variables.
In Scala, it is used to denote annotations (as in Java), and also to bind names to subpatterns in pattern-matching expressions.
In ML, it denotes list concatenation.
In Clipper, it is used to denote position on the screen. For example: @1,1 SAY "HELLO" to show the word "HELLO" in line 1, row 1.
COMMENTS
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BelovedxTwilight
19:58 May 04 2010
Boy oh boy...makes me wonder how they get any real work done if they waste their time with dead end phone calls due to not doing their research first.