Some commentary on a geek poem.
If you've ever read The Pronunciation of Punctuation in Unix (and if you've not, I suggest you do!) you'll start to gain an appreciation of possibly the ultimate geek poem, once referenced at the University of Boulder, Colorado ¹:
In a recent magazine poll, readers established "waka" as the proper pronunciation for the angle-bracket characters < or >. The following poem appeared recently in the magazine.
The text of the poem follows:
< > ! * ' ' #
^ " ` $ $ -
! * = @ $ _
% * < > ~ # 4
& [ ] . . /
| { , , SYSTEM HALTED
The poem can only be appreciated by reading it aloud, as such:
Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat equal at dollar under-score,
Percent splat waka waka tilde number four,
Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma CRASH!
it looks scarily like a
fork bomb, and i certainly wouldn't recommend running it on your command line. That aside, I enjoyed this, though personally I've always heard "|" referred to as "pipe" or "pipe-bar", which to my ear, scans better, as well as being used in Linux for command output redirection. i've never heard it called "vertical bar" in the computing community. Perhaps it was local to students in Colorado?
It took me altogether too long to format this correctly.
¹ https://spot.colorado.edu/~sniderc/poetry/wakawaka.html
xclip -o \ wc -w
184