My good friend Luís is doing a series of posts on C# 3.0.
Talking with him about C# made me thing about the true story behind the name of C#.
James Kovacs summarizes the whole story here.
Published Mon, Sep 24 2007 0:39 by Paulo Morgado
Why didn't Sharp sue Microsoft over the name?
I heard that they made legal overtures towards the Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) when they had a new language for Axiom 2.0 (a computer algebra system) called A#.
(The previous language was called "Spad" an abbreviation of the original name of Axiom, ScratchPad - back when it was an IBM project).
In the end, A# was renamed Aldor. Like C#, part of the joke was over it being "Axiom" ++++.
Nicolas Doye
Because it's C Charp and not C Sharp. :)
Paulo Morgado