Solidus
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

This article concerns punctuation. For the coin see Solidus (coin).

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A solidus or slash, /, is a punctuation mark. It is also called a diagonal, separatrix, shilling mark, stroke, or virgule.

Usage:

English

The most common use is to replace the hyphen to make clear a strong joint between words or phrases, such as "the Ernest Hemingway/William Faulkner generation".

For a specialized use of the slash in the titles of fan fiction stories, see slash fiction.

Arithmetic

A solidus is used to separate the numerator and denominator in a vulgar fraction, or as a division operator in general.

3/8 – three eighths

x = a / b – x equals a divided by b

Computing

Usually called a slash or sometimes, unnecessarily, a forward slash, / is used to separate directory or names in Unix file paths and in URLs.

www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidus_%28punctuation%29

This is in contrast to the backslash \\ which is path delimiter on Microsoft Windows systems. Windows uses the backslash rather than the slash because in the early days of MS-DOS -- before directories were supported! -- the slash was chosen as the command-line option indicator:

dir /w /ogn c:\\windows\\

Other

Before decimalisation in the UK, / was used to separate poundss, shillings, and pence values.

2/6 – two shillings and six pence

10/- – ten shillings

£1/19/11 – one pound, nineteen shillings, and eleven pence

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In computer programming, the solidus corresponds to Unicode and ASCII character 47, or 0x002F.

The original article can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidus.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.