I learned the asterisk character is the reason splatbooks are named such (from *books). However, I've been unable to find any specifics on who started pronouncing * as "splat". I know it's not very common now (more people, myself included, say "star"), but it was popular enough with programmers and gamers in the early to mid nineties, and was used in 1990 in the poem Waka Waka Bang Splat.
What group or groups started saying * as "splat"? When was this at its height?
Best Answer
References: http://ss64.com/jargon.html http://ss64.com/bash/syntax-pronounce.html
" \!* " is pronounced bash-bang-splat
SPLAT n. 1. Name used in many places (DEC, IBM, and others) for the ASCII star ("*") character. 2. (MIT) Name used by some people for the ASCII pound-sign ("#") character. 3. (Stanford) Name used by some people for the Stanford/ITS extended ASCII circle-x character. (This character is also called "circle-x", "blobby", and "frob", among other names.) 4. (Stanford) Name for the semi-mythical extended ASCII circle-plus character. 5. Canonical name for an output routine that outputs whatever the the local interpretation of splat is. Usage: nobody really agrees what character "splat" is, but the term is common.