The biggest difficulty I met when mentoring master students and doing TA is not to actually fix bugs, but to guide the student to enter a specific command - I never learnt the names of common symbols for either programming or writing in any English class, which is a terrible oversight.
Here I collected the English name list of common symbols for reference.
Class 1: Symbols on keyboard
| SYMBOLS | NAMES |
|---|
| ~ | Tilde |
| ` | Backtick, back quote |
| ¬ | Negation (symbol) |
| £ | Pound sign, Pound stering symbol |
| $ | Dollar sign |
| % | Percent sign |
| ^ | Caret |
| & | Ampersand |
| * | Asterisk |
| () | Parenthesis |
| - | Hyphen |
| [] | Square brackets |
| {} | Curly brackets, Braces, Squiggly brackets |
| <> | Angle brackets |
| >, < | Greater-than, Less-than signs |
| », « | Right, Left shift |
| : | Colon |
| ; | Semicolon |
| . | Full stop, Full stop punction |
| , | Comma |
| @ | At, At sign |
| # | Number sign, Hash |
| ’’ | (single) Quotation marks, Quotes |
| ”” | (double) Quotation marks, Quotes |
| ! | Exclamation mark |
| ? | Question mark |
| / | Slash |
| \ | Backslash |
| | | Viertical bar |
Class 2: Escape characters
| SYMBOLS | NAMES |
|---|
| \a | Alert, Bell |
| \b | Backspace |
| \e | Escape |
| \f | Form feed |
| \n | New line |
| \r | Carrage return |
| \s | Space |
| \t | Tab |
| \v | Vertical tab |
Class 3: Greek alphabet
| UPPER, LOWER CASE | NAME |
|---|
| $A, \alpha$ | Alpha |
| $B, \beta$ | Beta |
| $\Gamma, \gamma$ | Gamma |
| $\Delta, \delta$ | Delta |
| $E, \epsilon$ | Epsilon |
| $Z, \zeta$ | Zeta |
| $H, \eta$ | Eta |
| $\Theta, \theta$ | Theta |
| $I, \iota$ | Iota |
| $K, \kappa$ | Kappa |
| $\Lambda, \lambda$ | Lambda |
| $M, \mu$ | Mu |
| $N, \nu$ | Nu |
| $\Xi, \xi$ | Xi |
| $O, o$ | Omicron |
| $\Pi, \pi$ | Pi |
| $R, \rho$ | Rho |
| $\Sigma, \sigma$ | Sigma |
| $T, \tau$ | Tau |
| $\Upsilon, \upsilon$ | Upsilon |
| $\Phi, \phi$ | Phi |
| $X, \chi$ | Chi |
| $\Psi, \psi$ | Psi |
| $\Omega, \omega$ | Omega |
