Tuesday, March 15, 2016

writing - Which indefinite article to use if the noun starts with a non-letter character?

In the Perl programming language, symbols in front of variable names are called a sigil. When reading code out loud, the sigil is spoken. $foo becomes dollar foo. The sigil for functions is the ampersand &, but it's mostly omitted because using it explicitly does special things that you mostly do not want.



In the following sentence, does the indefinite article in front of the &foo need to be a, or an when it is written out?




What happens if the package does not have an &foo?





The above looks weird to me, but I believe that's because I'm reading the & as und in my head (which is the colloquial name in my native language German for this symbol), but I think it is correct.



Some people might read this does not have a foo, while others might read does not have an ampersand foo.






I'm aware that I could rewrite this so it's less ambiguous and the sigil can be omitted, but I am curious.





What happens if the package does not have a method foo?


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