Dollar sign
The dollar sign or " Pesozeichen " is a currency symbol. It is represented as a large S with one or two vertical bars ($) and used to identify a variety of currencies, see list of dollar currencies.
Dissemination
The character, originally a weight mark for gold, first for the Spanish-Mexican Peso ( piastres ) was used. From Mexico it was taken with the introduction of the U.S. currency in the 1780s and 1790s by the United States with the word "dollar". The original function as Goldmaßzeichen was pushed back by it.
The sign is now used as a universal currency symbol for all currencies designated as dollar or peso, often together with a letter abbreviation to disambiguate ( eg, U.S. $). In addition, it is or was used for the Bolivian Peso Boliviano, the Malaysian ringgit, the Nicaraguan Córdoba, the Portuguese escudo (with two strokes, see Cifrão ), the Samoan Tala, as well as for Tongan Paanga.
In Cuba, the dollar sign is used for both the convertible peso and the Cuban peso, the convertible peso as a rule, two vertical bars and the national peso shows a vertical line through the south.
Origin
The character appeared later than in the 1770s initially on in manuscripts in commerce between Mexico and the British colonies of North America for the identification of the Spanish currency. The origin can not be proven unambiguously, but it is likely that it is the passage of time from the hand-written abbreviation for peso Ps ( s ) or piastres (originally weight measurements) has developed.
Often the character is seen as a stylized symbol of the Pillars of Hercules, which symbolize the ( Spanish ) entitled to overseas rule. Originally, the Pillars of Hercules were a symbol of the end of the habitable world, the equivalent of saying nec plus ultra. Since starting with Christopher Columbus' voyages of discovery new lands were discovered in the West, elected Emperor Charles V, the Pillars of Hercules with the motto " Plus Ultra" as a personal symbol that was marked on his coins, and so prevailed as the weight mark for gold. The two strokes were to be read as the column and the "S " as a stylized banner. However, the spelling was also common with a bar at the sign for " Peso " from the beginning.
Another theory explains the origin of the character from the old Portuguese Cifrão, a number separator, which was also written as S with two vertical bars. Less likely is that the character has evolved from a ligature, as exemplified by the pound symbol £ ( a compound of the letters l and b ) is the case. The assumption that the origin of the character in the young United States was going on and its origin an operation preceded by a dash as an abbreviation for the shilling s was the British currency or the British spelling " 8 / " for eight shillings (in some U.S. States of the value of a peso ), is probably wrong.
Another theory favors the development of the code " P8 " for the peso, which had a value of eight reales. A common " Spanish dollar " an 8- reales coin, called "Piece of Pay " in the literature at that time was often under the English name " pieces of eight. " The thesis $ 'm from the Roman abbreviation IIS or HS for the Roman coin sestertius, is considered to be refuted, although the early United States like borrowing from ancient Rome took ( Capitol, Senate ).
Other Uses
For the $ character was created in 1963 by the American Standards Association standard X3.4 -1963 (known as ASCII) 36 (hexadecimal 24 ) characters of the space provided. ASCII and other 7-bit code standards as ECMA- 6 nor foresaw the alternative use other currency symbols in the same place. In 8 -bit codes such as ISO 8859, the allocation of $ has been written to the character position 36 and can be found at the same location in the Unicode standard.
Due to the early standardization of the character in character sets and the consequent presence on keyboards for computer terminals and the sign was also used as a syntactical element in programming and data processing languages.
Examples:
- In the BASIC programming language as a suffix for the identification of string variables and functions ( for example, S $, CHR $ (), etc.). Since it thus marked a text variable, the dollar sign is still often called " string " sign.
- In the programming language Pascal and some assembler languages as a prefix for hexadecimal constants ( for example, $ 0A000 )
- In many Unix shells as a prefix for the identification of variables and special variables ( such as $ PATH, $ 1, $! ), Further it shows at the end of the input Prompt a shell normal user rights (as opposed to root privileges with the #).
- In the programming languages PHP, Perl, Tcl, etc. as a prefix for the identification of variables. ( for example, $ count, $ sql)
- In the Ruby programming language as a prefix to identify global variables.
- In regular expressions as a reference for a newline.
- In spreadsheet applications (eg OpenOffice.org Calc, Microsoft Excel) to absolute referencing a specific cell.
- In CP / M, the $ sign is used as a termination for strings in the screen output. DOS took over this function. ( For example, " Hello World $ " in the issue of Hello World. )