Programming Punctuation Poem

I’ve been on some­what of a punc­tu­a­tion kick lately, and I re­mem­bered a poem:

< > ! * ' ' #
^ " ` $ $ -
! * = @ $ _
% * < > ~ # 4
& [ ] . . /
| { , , SYSTEM HALTED

This does­n’t seem like much of a poem un­til you re­al­ize that pro­gram­mers have dif­fer­ent names for punc­tu­a­tion than English pro­fes­sors. When read­ing code it’s much eas­ier to say “bang” than to say “exclamation point”, and pro­gram­mers are noth­ing if not ef­fi­cient (which is to say, we’re lazy). Here’s the trans­la­tion:

<    >    !    *     '    '    #
Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
^     "     `         $      $      -
Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash,
!    *     =     @  $      _
Bang splat equal at dollar underscore,
%       *     <    >    ~     #      4  
Percent splat waka waka tilde number four,
&         [       ]       .   .   /    
Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash,
|            {             ,     ,     SYSTEM HALTED    
Vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma CRASH.

Kudos to the au­thors Fred Bremmer and Steve Kroese, who got the poem printed in the May/June 1990 is­sue of Infocus mag­a­zine.