~ and name mangling

That squiggly little thing ~ that seems so annoying sometimes is called a tilde.

It actually has several uses. Wikipedia says that the tilde is used in diacritical notation, electronics, mathematics and computing. It can also used as a punctuation mark, and it has a nudge-nudge-wink-wink usage in the UK.

In Denmark, Sweden and Norway, it's a personal name. (But it doesn't appear on the lists of Icelandic female names or male names that I posted a few months ago.)

Here's my favourite: it's used in Microsoft's name-mangling scheme. That's when a longer, up-to-255-character filename is rendered in the old DOS 8-3 format: For example, "Program Files" becomes "PROGRA~1".