Does anyone actually know what the  "~" symbol is for?

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The Call of the Wendigo wrote:

Does anyone actually know what the  "~" symbol is for?

It's a tilde.

In Spanish and Portuguese it goes over letters like N to make a "nya" sound.

It has some other science/mathsy uses too.

Nightjar wrote:

The Call of the Wendigo wrote:

Does anyone actually know what the  "~" symbol is for?

It's a tilde.

That doesn't tell me what it's for.

See above.

Quote :

As a mathematical symbol, the tilde means "approximately" and in logic it means "not."

~ is often used as an alternative to the proper approximation symbol ≈ because ≈ is so bloody hard to get on Windows. I had to look at 6 different websites to find one to copy for this post.

Sometimes you see it next to an AC voltage to indicate that it's AC not DC, presumably because it looks like a little sine wave.

In computing it can be the bitwise complement operator, which flips all the bits of its operand.

eg 6 is 00000110 binary and ~6 is 11111001 binary, or 249 decimal.

In Perl it's part of the equals-wobbly operator for regular expressions:

if ("Wendi" =~ m/W.ndi/) { print "Wendi matches"; }

I love to explain symbols so will be happy to discourse on any others that have excited your curiosity.

Thank you, Fangy. That is a very in-depth explanation.

alt + x

≈

I like the reason ~ = root of the home directory on Unix/Linux style OSs, it was on the same key as 'home'

I can't remember what 'Home' did, did it put the cursor at the top left of the screen or something?

ISTR it did something other than what I wanted it to. Getting flashbacks now to using Sun workstations.

I don't recognise any of the adjacent ones either. That must be a very wild, lonely part of the Unicode table.

'Bell Symbol'