English (such as the German sharp-S or the ae-ligature which is a
letter in, for example, Norwegian). It could be worse, though. It
could be much worse. See [630]EBCDIC to understand how. A history of
ASCII and its ancestors is at
[631]http://www.wps.com/texts/codes/index.html.

Computers are much pickier and less flexible about spelling than
humans; thus, hackers need to be very precise when talking about
characters, and have developed a considerable amount of verbal
shorthand for them. Every character has one or more names -- some
formal, some concise, some silly. Common jargon names for ASCII
characters are collected here. See also individual entries for
[632]bang, [633]excl, [634]open, [635]ques, [636]semi, [637]shriek,
[638]splat, [639]twiddle, and [640]Yu-Shiang Whole Fish.

This list derives from revision 2.3 of the Usenet ASCII pronunciation
guide. Single characters are listed in ASCII order; character pairs
are sorted in by first member. For each character, common names are
given in rough order of popularity, followed by names that are
reported but rarely seen; official ANSI/CCITT names are surrounded by
brokets: <>. Square brackets mark the particularly silly names
introduced by [641]INTERCAL. The abbreviations "l/r" and "o/c" stand
for left/right and "open/close" respectively. Ordinary parentheticals
provide some usage information.

!
Common: [642]bang; pling; excl; shriek; ball-bat; mark>. Rare: factorial; exclam; smash; cuss; boing; yell; wow;
hey; wham; eureka; [spark-spot]; soldier, control.