[justinlardinois]

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."

[geon]

I used to call it "fence" (gärdsgård) in Swedish.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundpole_fence

[cyberferret]

> It's a different symbol than the sharp

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'... :)

[ethanbond]

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.

[jakobegger]

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".

[dragonwriter]

> 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.

[tamana]

You were correct before ASCII and English keyboards and Microsoft C# gave the # an expanded role out of convenience

[Mtinie]

- sharp [1]

# ‎- octothorpe [2]

Different symbols, though very similar.

(Edit: So much so that the true sharp symbol apparently does not render correctly on HN)

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_(music)

[2] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/octothorpe

[Sir_Cmpwn]

Most books I've seen use C rather than C#. Bad editor if they don't.

[mikestew]

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.

[justinlardinois]

I assume there was supposed to be a sharp after the first C?

[tamana]

Microsoft, the inventor and trademark owner, use # on their website.