Recently I found an unexpected "Unicode moment" buried in the documentation for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. This was written by Bobby Schmidt in 2000.
> The name "C sharp" is really spelled as shown in my column's banner > graphic: The capital letter C followed by a musical sharp sign. > Because this sign does not exist in ASCII, most of us approximate the > name as C#. This approximation leads to witty derivatives such as "C > hash," "C pound," and the tortuous "C octothorpe"âall based on a > convenient but incorrect typography. My personal favorite is "D flat," > which has the twin virtues of cleverness and correctness, but would > actually require equally un-ASCII typography. The "musical sharp sign," of course, is U+266F, making the correct spelling Câ. Pronouncing Câ as "D flat" is musically correct, at least in the equal-tempered environment, but has the twin disadvantages of (a) stomping on the name of a library published in Dr. Dobb's Journal during the early '90s and (b) creating an even worse typography problem. "Db" would be almost universally pronounced "dee-bee," leading to major abbreviation-overloading problems in the database world. Only the true Unicode spelling, Dâ, could prevent this. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
