Bang

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Though its public persona is intrusive and abrasive, the humble exclamation mark is one of syntax's most important and yet delicate creations.

Common Uses of the Delicate yet Humble Exclamation Mark

  • Factorial operator
  • Exponential modality
  • Negation in C-like languages
  • Reference unboxing in SML '97
  • Typographic variant of '1' or 'l'
  • In pairs, list indexing in Haskell
  • Calligraphic error
  • Extremely makeshift up-arrow or down-arrow, depending how you look at it
  • Produces a vertical line on keyboards without a proper pipe key
  • In emacs, equivalent to M-x viet-encode-viqr-region under the correct bindings
  • With '#', interpreted executable escape in Unix
  • Comment character in Fortran '90
  • Under the Bourne shell, a varaible containing the process ID of the most recent background job
  • In perl, a variable containing a description of the most recent error condition
  • Solitaire, a pseudoword indicating an expression of surprise or alarm
  • Appears by convention in the names of mutating functions in Scheme
  • Frequently appears as a typo when inputting the string "1>1<1>1<1"