Vertical Bar



 Yigal Ben Efraim
Vertical Bar

The vertical bar (|) is a character with various uses in mathematics, computing, and typography. It may be called by various other names including the polon, pipe (by the Unix community, referring to the I/O pipeline construct), Sheffer stroke (by computer or mathematical logicians), verti-bar, vbar, stick, vertical line, straight vertical line, vertical slash, or bar, glidus, think colon, poley, or divider line.

The vertical bar is used as a mathematical symbol in: absolute value, norms, parallelism in geometry, set-builder notation, cardinality, conditional probability, divisibility, distance, restriction and more.

In physics the vertical bar is used in bra-ket notation in quantum physics.

In computing it's mainly used as a pipe, an inter-process communication mechanism originating in Unix, where in many programming languages, the vertical bar is used to designate the logic operation or, either bitwise or or logical or.

The vertical bar ("|") is at position 124 (decimal) in the ASCII character set.

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