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Aaron's Technology Musings

Who let this guy on the podium?

F# Oddities, the § symbol

I was looking for where the § is on my keyboard, as many of the Linq to SQL samples in F# use that in front of the database context variable. Strange enough, was looking on my keyboard for it, with no luck. The key does not exist, at least on my laptop. Thus, I see a market opportunity.. an add-in for vs, possibly on codeplex, that puts § as a toolbar button so those of us with US keyboards will still be in luck :) Of course, I wonder who DOES have that on the keyboard. Truth be told, when I read that in the Expert F# book at first, I thought it was a typo... apparently, no!

Lets hope that part of the spec changes... soon :)
 

Published Friday, April 18, 2008 6:20 PM by aarone

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Comments

# re: F# Oddities, the § symbol @ Friday, April 18, 2008 5:35 PM

Ha! But did you know you can use the % symbol as of 1.9.3.14? The § is, I'll admit, likely to be deprecated in a future release :-)

Don Syme

# re: F# Oddities, the § symbol @ Friday, April 18, 2008 8:15 PM

FYI, on both XP and Vista, you can "type" this using the application Start\Programs\Accessories\SystemTools\CharacterMap Once you have one "§" it's easy to cut-and-paste elsewhere. That said, I don't know the original motivation behind choosing that particular symbol for the splice-into-quotation operator... could be a good discussion topic for http://cs.hubfs.net/

Brian McNamara

# re: F# Oddities, the § symbol @ Saturday, April 19, 2008 4:39 AM

Wow - now THATS a response :)  Thanks guys!

Wasn't sure I could announce the change as Brian did tell me the solution during the MVP summit, but I assumed it was under NDA, so I couldn't technically blog about it.

aarone

# re: F# Oddities, the § symbol @ Saturday, April 19, 2008 11:59 AM

The § symbols is on the french keyboard (above the explanation mark) so I would like to keep it the language. There has to be some advantage to learning the weird azerty system.

Robert Pickering

# re: F# Oddities, the § symbol @ Saturday, April 19, 2008 12:44 PM

Ahhh... I see, so its YOUR fault Robert! :)

aarone

# re: F# Oddities, the § symbol @ Sunday, April 20, 2008 8:59 AM

You are quite right - this is a very difficult character for many of us to type :-).  In current F# builds, you can actually use "%" instead to mean the same thing.  Most likely the § character will be deprectaed in future releases.

Luke Hoban

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