Talk:Underscore

Underdot

"The underscore is used as a diacritic mark in some African and Native American languages. The underscore is sometimes used as an underdot (Unicode: COMBINING DOT BELOW) in romanized Arabic and Hebrew.."

What exactly is the parenthetical trying to indicate? Is it saying to see the approprate section on the page (if so, this isn't the way to do so)? It doesn't seem to make any sense to me, so it should be either clarified or removed. —Matthew0028 06:28, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

It's the canonical name of the underdot in Unicode. -- Jordi·✆ 10:53, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

Doesn't "underscore" have another meaning?

To my knowledge, an "underscore" can also be a musical piece used in cartoon films (for you Yanks: "movies"), e. g. those Hanna-Barbera ones. -andy 80.129.92.31 22:04, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

I've heard of it as a "score", but never as an "underscore". Dictionary.com backs this up. And, fyi, "films" is a common enough term here in the U.S. (and interchangable with "movies"). --Matthew0028 00:05, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Instead of spaces

"It is also often used instead of a space in computer operating systems, filenames, e-mail addresses, and in World Wide Web URLs." Why is this? Nowadays most if not all OSs and file systems can cope with spaces in filenames, so far as I know.YourMessageHere 13:09, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

On command lines / programs that interpret command lines, a space is used as a delimiter. This can be escaped or quoted, but it's generally more convenient to just avoid spaces in filenames. 68.82.171.129 (talk) 01:47, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Underscore Group

I clumsily added information about the Underscore Group based in Bristol, UK. It has been a highly influential group in the southwest and has helped turn this region into a thriving online community, people do ask what "underscore" is not thinking it's a character but thinking of the group that has been meeting on and off here for over ten years (officially it's ten years sometime later this year, but the ball was rolling earlier than that).

A number of fairly succesful projects have come via underscore and it would be a shame to lose the historical relevance of a small group of people just because it's a small group of people (less than a few thousand I think, hopefully someone can work out approximate numbers so far).

Underscore was named purposefully partly because of the problems with using underscores in web work, urls and so on that far too few people even those working in the media seem fully aware of.

Should it be on a disambiguation page, should it not be in wikipedia or should it be somewhere else? I don't know, but apologies for the clumsy addition and for writing this originally without signing it. --SteveRoome 03:42, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Can you use Underscores in the title of Wiki articles?

DragoonWraith 00:22, 3 May 2007 (UTC): At another Wiki I participate in, there is a need for articles that have underscores in them, but I cannot figure out anyway to prevent underscores from being switched to spaces... Any help would be appreciated.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by DragoonWraith (talk • contribs) 00:22, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

Discussion on C language inappropriate for this article

I'm new to editing Wikipedia, so I don't know how to do this myself. I think that the discussion on C and C's linker is inappropriate to an article on typography. Perhaps this could be removed and replaced with a hyperlink to the more specialised text in a different article. People who have an interest in C's use of the underscore can follow the link, and people who are not programmers can ignore it -- but at the moment there is far too much information for what is supposed to be a small sidenote. JohnXCitizen (talk) 10:12, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

I also think this description is incredibly erroneous.

The length limits of C linkers has little if anything to do with the use of underscores. The actual effect was to *limit* the use of underscore, as you needed to cram the "different" characters close to the start of the identifier to make sure the linker distinguished them, thus it would discourage leading underscore, completely contrary to the article.

Leading underscores to indicate protection, etc, is a much more recent invention. Initially compilers would use extra characters such as $ that are illegal in the C standard. Leading underscores are used in Python and many other languages with no length limits so that is not a reason for them (besides the fact that length limits would *discourage* use of underscore, not encourage it!).

Use of underscore was due to fixed-case: early systems had no lower case at all, some languages required the identifiers to all be in upper or lower case, these seemed to have influenced the authors of C to encourage all-lower-case. Use of upper-case for macros has nothing to do with "lack of namespace", macros have to be in the same "namespace" as other ids, otherwise they would not work (how else could it tell whether to do a macro substitution?).

This whole section is so misleading I recommend removing it.Spitzak (talk) 17:33, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

Keyboard diagram

My apologies if this is a naive question, but why is there a diagram of one particular style of computer keyboard at the end of the article? The article is about typography, with some computer-related content dealing primarily with COBOL, 1964 EBCDIC, and similar historical references to the origin of underscore in computing. Why, then, is such a big block of space at the end of the article occupied by a large, not particularly well done, diagram of equipment that didn't even exist at that time? I would suggest that either (1) it be deleted and replaced with one more appropriate to the topic, such as an IBM 029 or IBM 3270 keyboard; (2) all keyboards since the advent of COBOL be illustrated; or (3) to maintain a platform-neutral perspective, no particular keyboard be shown. 76.100.17.21 (talk) 01:25, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

Merge discussion (2014) combining Underline and underscore

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.

• Underline
• Underscore

Fgnievinski (talk · contribs) proposed a silly thing. It is possible that some reputable sources use the word underscore for underline. It is also possible that the current underscore Wikipedia article strays into the topic of “underline”. But the things are distinct in the same sense as space (punctuation) and indentation. Underscores and spaces are characters, they are parts of a text. Underlines and indents are typesetting items, they doesn’t belong to the text (in the narrow sense). Just like

  thing

may be used to emulate

thing

, but the two are not identical, one was able to emulate underline on a typewriter with underscores. But try to select underscore characters (_____) and a properly underlined text (     ) in a browser, and you’ll see the difference. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 18:07, 22 March 2014 (UTC)

Yeah, this is far from the worst merge proposal I've seen here since 2004, but it should have been DOA. Especially since the tag hanger didn't initialize any talk section with his rationale despite clear directions in the {{mergeto}} and {{mergefrom}} templates! Removing both header tags accordingly. // FrankB 16:01, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

---

The above discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.

Merge

Until now, we have two articles, Underscore and Underline, that are essentially the same because the words are synonyms. I have taken the advice at WP:MERGE, been bold, and just merged them. Underscore becomes the main article, underline a redirect to underscore, because of WP:Common name: Google's Ngram viewer has underscore the clear winner

Of course wp:BRD applies but so does WP:IDONTLIKEIT. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 23:22, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

References

Contradictory introduction

The introduction contradicts itself: In the third sentence it says "Its use to add emphasis in modern documents is a deprecated practice". The introduction's last sentence says the opposite: "It is also used as markup to indicate underscore or italics, for instance _thus_ renders as thus or thus." MathiasHasselmann (talk) 08:44, 11 January 2023 (UTC)

Perhaps it needs to be reworded. The first case describes finished documents, the second a kind of markup language akin to proofreader's marks (giving an instruction as to what needs to be done – traditionally by the typesetter – to 'set' the final form of the finished document). Can you suggest an improved wording? --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 11:02, 11 January 2023 (UTC)

I forgot to say thank you for this feedback. For every person who bothers to report a problem, a thousand have gone away confused. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 11:13, 11 January 2023 (UTC)