Re: Just to mudddy the waters a trifle ...
"!" has been pronounced "bang" for centuries, it's a printer's term.
For the computer world, look up "bang path". I was stanford!sail!jake in the late '70s and early '80s. (The bang path is mostly correct, but I've changed the name to protect the guilty as I should be archived at DejaGoo, if the gootards ever fix it :-)
Then there is the "#!" interpreter directive ... Naming it back in the day was a trifle problematic ... "hashbang" was a no-go during the 70s; sounded too much like hashbong & the various neckbearded hippies[1] who were busy (re)inventing UNIX/BSD were paranoid ... octothorpe-bang is clumsy, and pound-bang is just plain weird ... So almost by default, it became "sharp-bang" which was modified to sh-bang (from /bin/sh), and pronounced & later written shebang.
[1]They say that if you remember the SF Bay Area during the 60s & 70s, you didn't live there, but I'm here to tell you that some of us were smart enough to not get into pot ;-)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
