Wiley C# 2005 Programmer's Reference 978-0-470-04641-8 用户手册

What is C#?

So, you want a C# reference? OK, well the best place to begin is by looking at what C# is and
where it came from.

The Name

First off, the name. According to the ECMA-334 C# Language Specification (

http://www.

ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-334.htm

), the name is combined

of a Latin capital letter C (U+0043) followed by the number symbol # (U+0023). C# is pronounced
“C sharp” or “see sharp.”

The origin of the name is somewhat shrouded in mystery. Some believe that it may have been chosen
by Microsoft to imply a progression from C++, with the # symbol composed of four + symbols
arranged to form a square. Another origin for the name could be more musical, implying that it’s not
as far from C as C++ is, because ++ is the symbol for the increment operator. In music, a # indicates a
note that is one half step above the other, so C# might show that it is only a half step above C.

The musical readers among you might have recognized that the # symbol on the keyboard is not
the proper symbol for sharp. It is instead the number sign. This is used because the symbol for a
musical sharp (U+266F) is not present on a standard keyboard, so expecting people to type it
would be a bit of an inconvenience. Despite this symbol being used, the language is not called 
“see pound” or “see hash” or even “see gate”!

C# Over view

C# is an object-oriented programming language developed by Microsoft to become a key part of
their .NET software development platform. Being object-oriented, C# is composed of a collection
of individual programming units called classes that can interact with each other. 

C# is based on the C++ language, but there is no doubt that it was influenced by Microsoft’s other
popular language, Visual Basic. One of the biggest advantages of C# is that its syntax (in other
words, the structure of the code) is similar to that of a number of other popular programming 

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