<>!*”#
^@`$$-
!*’$_
%*<>#4
&)../
{~~SYSTEM HALTED

– Author Unknown

How do you pronounce punctuation? You are probably already familiar with some of the pronunciations from your telephone: #as pound, * as star. And from e-mail you get @ as at.

But computer programmers have been at this for a long time. Punctuation marks have a very important role in writing computer programs and as an extension how computer programmers communicate. So they came up with some shortcuts. Like that ! is pronounced bang. Or . is dot. I’ve heard people call ~ twiddle. Yesterday at work we were discussing why Dave called $ String. My guess is that it was from basic programming, and a quick check of the ASCII entry in the Jargon File proved me correct.

So back to our poem. The transliteration of the poem is as follows:

Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret at back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat tick dollar under-score,
Percent splat waka waka number four,
Ampersand right-paren dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket tilde tilde CRASH.

– Author Unknown

Read the full post of Punctuation Poems here: http://www.feep.net/~roth/geek-humor/misc/punctuation-poem.