Ah, good old pipe. The hacker's friend, the newbies confuser. To make it more fun, most keyboards depict it as a split line instead of a solid one.
My three most common uses of the good ol' pipe:
1. Math: absolute value, divisors, set definitions, function domain restrictions, etc.
2. Unix pipe, of course.
3. Logical "or" in many programming languages, regular expresssions, syntax definitions, etc.
So I like the little symbol, and I need it. That said, I think there are too many symbols that look alike. Mostly it depends on the font: in sans-serif fonts it is generally much harder to distinguish characters from eachother. But even in serif fonts I still get confused sometimes, especially in printed material where it has become impossible to actually inspect the byte and look what ascii value it has. I mean, how many different characters are there that look like a vertical bar? I think there are at least 6: I, i, 1, !, l, |. And depending on your font, some of those must look almost or exactly identical. Usually, a lowercase L ("l") looks either like a one ("1") or like a capital i ("I"). Lowercase i and "!" always have the gap, so they are not confusing, but if the pipe ("|") has a gap too, it could be confused with either of them, at a first glance. Anyway, if the pipe has no gap, it could look like an l or I again.
The problem is most troublesome in small fonts like subscripts. For instance, in mathematical notations, when indexing a variable, usually people use 1,2,3,..., and also i, j, k, l, ... Now, you see there are already 4 symbols (1,i,j,l) that can be hard to distinguish when written as a subscript. Things get even more confusing with nested indices (because the font gets even smaller).
So in conclusion, I like the pipe, because it is useful. I don't like the way it looks, because there's already plenty of symbols that look like that. But I guess it's up to the people that use it to use it in a non-ambiguous way.
Topic: Funny tard (Read 1822 times)
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