Английская Википедия:At sign

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Шаблон:Short description Шаблон:For Шаблон:Redirect Шаблон:Technical reasons Шаблон:Infobox symbol The at sign, Шаблон:Char, is an accounting and invoice abbreviation meaning "at a rate of" (e.g. 7 widgets @ £2 per widget = £14),[1] now seen more widely in email addresses and social media platform handles. It is normally read aloud as "at" and is also commonly called the at symbol, commercial at, or address sign.

The absence of a single English word for the symbol has prompted some writers to use the French arobase[2] or Spanish and Portuguese arroba, or to coin new words such as ampersat[3] and asperand,[4] or the (visual) onomatopoeia strudel,[5] but none of these have achieved wide use.

Although not included on the keyboard of the earliest commercially successful typewriters, it was on at least one 1889 model[6] and the very successful Underwood models from the "Underwood No. 5" in 1900 onward. It started to be used in email addresses in the 1970s, and is now routinely included on most types of computer keyboards.

History

Файл:19-manasses-chronicle.jpg
@ symbol used as the initial "a" for the "amin" (amen) formula in the Bulgarian of the Manasses Chronicle, Шаблон:C..[7]
Файл:Ariza1448-2.jpg
The Aragonese @ symbol used in the 1448 "taula de Ariza" registry to denote a wheat shipment from Castile to the Kingdom of Aragon.[8]
Файл:1674 liten.jpg
@ used to signify French "Шаблон:Lang" ("at") from a 1674 protocol from a Swedish court (Шаблон:Lang)

The earliest yet discovered symbol in this shape is found in a Bulgarian translation of a Greek chronicle written by Constantinos Manasses in 1345. Held today in the Vatican Apostolic Library, it features the @ symbol in place of the capital letter alpha "Α" as an initial in the word Amen; however, the reason behind it being used in this context is still unknown. The evolution of the symbol as used today is not recorded.

It has long been used in Catalan, Spanish and Portuguese as an abbreviation of arroba, a unit of weight equivalent to 25 pounds, and derived from the Arabic expression of "the quarter" (Шаблон:Lang pronounced ar-rubʿ).[9] A symbol resembling an @ is found in the Spanish "Taula de Ariza", a registry to denote a wheat shipment from Castile to Aragon, in 1448.[10] An Italian academic, Giorgio Stabile, claims to have traced the @ symbol to the 16th century, in a mercantile document sent by Florentine Francesco Lapi from Seville to Rome on May 4, 1536.[10] The document is about commerce with Pizarro, in particular the price of an @ of wine in Peru. Currently, the word arroba means both the at-symbol and a unit of weight. In Venetian, the symbol was interpreted to mean amphora (Шаблон:Lang), a unit of weight and volume based upon the capacity of the standard amphora jar since the 6th century. It could also mean “adi” (standard Italian “addì”, i. e. ‘on the day of’) as used on a health pass in Northern Italy in 1667.[11]

Modern use

Commercial usage

In contemporary English usage, @ is a commercial symbol, meaning at and at the rate of or at the price of. It has rarely been used in financial ledgers, and is not used in standard typography.[12]

Trademark

In 2012, "@" was registered as a trademark with the German Patent and Trade Mark Office.[13] A cancellation request was filed in 2013, and the cancellation was ultimately confirmed by the German Federal Patent Court in 2017.[14]

Email addresses

A common contemporary use of @ is in email addresses (using the SMTP system), as in jdoe@example.com (the user jdoe located at the domain example.com). Ray Tomlinson of BBN Technologies is credited for having introduced this usage in 1971.[4][15] This idea of the symbol representing located at in the form user@host is also seen in other tools and protocols; for example, the Unix shell command ssh jdoe@example.net tries to establish an ssh connection to the computer with the hostname example.net using the username jdoe.

On web pages, organizations often obscure the email addresses of their members or employees by omitting the @. This practice, known as address munging, makes the email addresses less vulnerable to spam programs that scan the internet for them.

Social media

Шаблон:Further

On some social media platforms and forums, usernames may be prefixed with an @ (in the form @johndoe); this type of username is frequently referred to as a "handle"Шаблон:Citation needed.

On online forums without threaded discussions, @ is commonly used to denote a reply; for instance: @Jane to respond to a comment Jane made earlier. Similarly, in some cases, @ is used for "attention" in email messages originally sent to someone else. For example, if an email was sent from Catherine to Steve, but in the body of the email, Catherine wants to make Keirsten aware of something, Catherine will start the line Шаблон:Code to indicate to Keirsten that the following sentence concerns her.Шаблон:Citation needed This also helps with mobile email users who might not see bold or color in email.

In microblogging (such as on Twitter and GNU social-based microblogs), an @ before the user name is used to send publicly readable replies (e.g. @otheruser: Message text here). The blog and client software can automatically interpret these as links to the user in question. When included as part of a person's or company's contact details, an @ symbol followed by a name is normally understood to refer to a Twitter handle. A similar use of the @ symbol was also made available to Facebook users on September 15, 2009.[16] In Internet Relay Chat (IRC), it is shown before users' nicknames to denote they have operator status on a channel.

Sports usage

In American English the @ can be used to add information about a sporting event. Where opposing sports teams have their names separated by a "v" (for versus), the away team can be written first – and the normal "v" replaced with @ to convey at which team's home field the game will be played.[17] This usage is not followed in British English, since conventionally the home team is written first.

Computer languages

@ is used in various programming languages and other computer languages, although there is not a consistent theme to its usage. For example:

  • In ALGOL 68, the @ symbol is brief form of the at keyword; it is used to change the lower bound of an array. For example: Шаблон:Code refers to an array starting at index 88.[18]
  • In ActionScript, @ is used in XML parsing and traversal as a string prefix to identify attributes in contrast to child elements.[19]
  • In the ASP.NET MVC Razor template markup syntax, the @ character denotes the start of code statement blocks or the start of text content.[20][21]
  • In Dyalog APL, @ is used as a functional way to modify or replace data at specific locations in an array.
  • In CSS, @ is used in special statements outside of a CSS block.[22]
  • In C#, it denotes "verbatim strings", where no characters are escaped and two double-quote characters represent a single double-quote.[23] As a prefix it also allows keywords to be used as identifiers,[24] a form of stropping.
  • In D, it denotes function attributes: like: @safe, @nogc, user defined @('from_user') which can be evaluated at compile time (with __traits) or @property to declare properties, which are functions that can be syntactically treated as if they were fields or variables.[25]
  • In DIGITAL Command Language, the @ character was the command used to execute a command procedure. To run the command procedure VMSINSTAL.COM, one would type @VMSINSTAL at the command prompt.
  • In Forth, it is used to fetch values from the address on the top of the stack. The operator is pronounced as "fetch".
  • In Haskell, it is used in so-called as-patterns. This notation can be used to give aliases to patterns, making them more readable.
  • in HTML, it can be encoded as @[26]
  • In J, denotes function composition.
  • In Java, it has been used to denote annotations, a kind of metadata, since version 5.0.[27]
  • In Julia, it denotes the invocation of a macro.[28]
  • In LiveCode, it is prefixed to a parameter to indicate that the parameter is passed by reference.
  • In an LXDE autostart file (as used, for example, on the Raspberry Pi computer), @ is prefixed to a command to indicate that the command should be automatically re-executed if it crashes.[29]
  • In ML, it denotes list concatenation.
  • 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 Objective-C, @ is prefixed to language-specific keywords such as @implementation and to form string literals.
  • In Pascal, @ is the "address of" operator (it tells the location at which a variable is found).
  • In Perl, @ prefixes variables which contain arrays Шаблон:Code, including array slices Шаблон:Code and hash slices Шаблон:Code or Шаблон:Code. This use is known as a sigil.
  • In PHP, it is used just before an expression to make the interpreter suppress errors that would be generated from that expression.[30]
  • In Python 2.4 and up, it is used to decorate a function (wrap the function in another one at creation time). In Python 3.5 and up, it is also used as an overloadable matrix multiplication operator.[31]
  • In R and S-PLUS, it is used to extract slots from S4 objects.[32]
  • In Razor, it is used for C# code blocks.[33]
  • In Ruby, it functions as a sigil: @ prefixes instance variables, and @@ prefixes class variables.[34]
  • In Rust, it is used to bind values matched by a pattern to a variable.[35]
  • In Scala, it is used to denote annotations (as in Java), and also to bind names to subpatterns in pattern-matching expressions.[36]
  • In Swift, @ prefixes "annotations" that can be applied to classes or members. Annotations tell the compiler to apply special semantics to the declaration like keywords, without adding keywords to the language.
  • In T-SQL, @ prefixes variables and @@ prefixes "niladic" system functions.
  • In several xBase-type programming languages, like DBASE, FoxPro/Visual FoxPro and Clipper, it is used to denote position on the screen. For example: Шаблон:Code to show the word "HELLO" in line 1, column 1.
  • In a Windows Batch file, an @ at the start of a line suppresses the echoing of that command. In other words, is the same as ECHO OFF applied to the current line only. Normally a Windows command is executed and takes effect from the next line onward, but @ is a rare example of a command that takes effect immediately. It is most commonly used in the form Шаблон:Code which not only switches off echoing but prevents the command line itself from being echoed.[38][39]
  • In Windows PowerShell, @ is used as array operator for array and hash table literals and for enclosing here-string literals.[40]
  • In the Domain Name System (DNS), @ is used to represent the Шаблон:Code, typically the "root" of the domain without a prefixed sub-domain. (Ex: wikipedia.org vs. www.wikipedia.org)
  • In assembly language, @ is sometimes used as a dereference operator.[41]

Gender neutrality in Spanish

Файл:Madrid - Acampada Sol - 110521 192211.jpg
Protester with banner showing "La revolución está en nosotr@s"

Шаблон:Main

In Spanish, where many words end in "-o" when in the masculine gender and end "-a" in the feminine, @ is sometimes used as a gender-neutral substitute for the default "o" ending.[42] For example, the word amigos traditionally represents not only male friends, but also a mixed group, or where the genders are not known. The proponents of gender-inclusive language would replace it with amig@s in these latter two cases, and use amigos only when the group referred to is all-male and amigas only when the group is all female. The Real Academia Española disapproves of this usage.[43]

Other uses and meanings

Шаблон:More citations needed

Файл:Atletter.svg
Bicameral @ letter as used in the Koalib language.
Файл:OCR-A char Commercial At.svg
X-SAMPA uses an @ as a substitute for ə, which it resembles in some fonts.

Names in other languages

In many languages other than English, although most typewriters included the symbol, the use of @ was less common before email became widespread in the mid-1990s. Consequently, it is often perceived in those languages as denoting "the Internet", computerization, or modernization in general. Naming the symbol after animals is also common.

Файл:Basic interpreter on the DVK computer.JPG
@ on a DVK Soviet computer (Шаблон:Circa)

Unicode

In Unicode, the at sign is encoded as Шаблон:Unichar. The named entity @ was introduced in HTML5.[55]

Variants

Шаблон:Charmap

See also

References

Шаблон:Reflist

External links

Шаблон:Wiktionary Шаблон:Commons category

Шаблон:Navbox punctuation

  1. See, for example, Browns Index to Photocomposition Typography (p. 37), Greenwood Publishing, 1983, Шаблон:ISBN
  2. "Short Cuts" Шаблон:Webarchive, Daniel Soar, Vol. 31 No. 10 · 28 May 2009 page 18, London Review of Books
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  6. "The @-symbol, part 2 of 2" Шаблон:Webarchive, Shady Characters ⌂ The secret life of punctuation Шаблон:Webarchive
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  11. [1] Jürgen Beyer, ‘Gesundheitspässe und Impfatteste’, Gesellschaft für Schleswig-Holsteinische Geschichte. Mitteilungen 100 (2021), 21–29, reproduction on p. 26.
  12. Bringhurst, Robert (2002). The Elements of Typographic Style (version 2.5), p.272. Vancouver: Hartley & Marks. Шаблон:ISBN.
  13. German Patent and Trademark Office, registration number 302012038338 Шаблон:Webarchive.
  14. Bundespatentgericht, decision of 22 February 2017, no. 26 W (pat) 44/14 (online Шаблон:Webarchive).
  15. Шаблон:Cite web
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  17. For an example, see: http://www.nfl.com/schedules Шаблон:Webarchive
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  23. 2.4.4.5 String literals Шаблон:Webarchive,
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  47. Constable, Peter, and Lorna A. Priest (January 17, 2019) SIL Corporate PUA Assignments 5.2a Шаблон:Webarchive. SIL International Шаблон:Webarchive. pp. 59-60. Retrieved on July 20, 2020.
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  51. "At last, France has a name for the @ sign" Шаблон:Webarchive, December 9, 2002, iol.co.za
  52. Шаблон:Lang
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  55. HTML5 is the only version of HTML that has a named entity for the at sign, see https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/entities.html Шаблон:Webarchive ("The following sections present the complete lists of character entity references.") and https://www.w3.org/TR/2014/CR-html5-20140731/syntax.html#named-character-references Шаблон:Webarchive ("commat;").