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Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 11/20/78 11:45
On Wed, 19 Apr 2006, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
> I don't think that's common these days; the confusion between # and
> £ seems to be UK-specific.
The confusion between "pound" (meaning "#") and pound sterling is a
peculiarly USA-specific confusion - not recognised in the UK except by
those also familiar with USA-specific usage.
It just so happened that the UK national version of ISO-646 (BS4730,
see e.g *), had the pound sterling character in the same place that
us-ascii has its hash or number-sign character "#", which, as I say,
the USAns tend to call "pound". So that made it a kind of
double-bluff.
*) http://kanji.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~yasuoka/CJK/ISO646/bs4730.gif
anyone for an octothorpe? :-}
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