Wellll....it's 'funny-looking', isn't it? All that '$' and '@' nonsense - that's for colonial money and emails! When I was a lad, you could say "I'll have an integer please Bob" - none of this wishy-washy "is it a string? is it a float?" stuff. Why - I remember as if it were yesterday, saying to Babbage (in the Rat & Prime Minister over a pint of Old Bitcount) that he should have been thinking about whether a string was *working class* or not.
But we were terribly, terribly drunk...

Ben.