Although I didn’t know it, Danish concert pianist Victor Borge gave me my first taste of the spoken language of machines. The next tastes happened during my early days working for Telxon when Tillie Zema pronounced the “*” as “splat”. Then someone else called the “!” a “bang” (which is more efficient than the two sounds Borge used). Many years later, a magazine poll established "waka" as the proper pronunciation for the angle-bracket characters < and >.
As a writer, formerly of computer programs, I know how important it is to be precise with punctuation. When people read books, they may appreciate the surprise of non-traditional notation and can usually decipher the amusing meanings of non-normal text. But computers are the ultimate traditionalists—the ultimate pedants. Any C-code program which deviates from the forms defined by Kernighan and Plauger will get a compiler rejection, just as any fiction writer will get a rejection from harried human acquisitions editors who detect deviations from Strunk and White. ...Except that the compiler will send a message—possibly an obscure one—whereas most editors will probably send nothing unless paid to do so.
Worse, however, is that as long as the code meets syntax standards, the pedantic machine may chug away doing things the programmer did not intend. People, however, recognize blather, and they just laugh or stop reading or hire a lawyer.
Now that computer languages can be spoken, the practice of using the same sound (waka) for both < and > is a big computer No-No. To reduce confusion when speaking a line of code to someone else—especially to a pedantic computer or robot, I prefer "wika" for "<" and "waka" for ">". They correspond to the vowels in "min" (less than) and "max" (greater than). Since "bracket" is also confusing when using the same sound for the two characters [ and ], I use "bricket" for "[" and "bracket" for "]".
This wika-waka punctuation business started with a nerdy poem forwarded to me by a friend who took it from a Cathy Snider post at colorado.edu. Being a nerd myself, I like it too:
< > ! *
< > ! * ' ' #
^ " ` $ $ -
! * = @ $ _
% * < > ~ #4
& [ ] . . /
| { , , SYSTEM HALTED
That poem is best appreciated by humans when reading it aloud. Using my preferred pronunciations, it goes like this:
Wika waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat equal at dollar under-score,
Percent splat wika waka tilde number four,
Ampersand bricket bracket dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bricket comma comma CRASH!
Even that does not capture the spirit of the poem like a machine would. These days, as much as machines might want to take credit for inventing phonetic punctuation, that honor must go to Victor Borge. For any people and machines old enough to do so, I recommend imagining him reciting it uncorrupted by the English pronunciations. (Borge pronounced “dot” differently, for instance.) For any characters you don’t recognize, just invent sounds yourself; that’s what Victor did. For those not old or well educated enough, please take a break and search the Internet for videos of the late lamented Mr. Borge.