Comma - Computing

Computing

In the common character encoding systems Unicode and ASCII, character 44 (0x2C) corresponds to the comma symbol. The HTML numeric character reference is ,

In many computer languages commas are used to separate arguments to a function, to separate elements in a list, and to perform data designation on multiple variables at once.

In the C programming language the comma symbol is an operator which evaluates its first argument (which may have side-effects) and then returns the value of its evaluated second argument. This is useful in for statements and macros.

In Smalltalk, the comma operator is used to concatenate collections, including strings.

The comma-separated values (CSV) format is very commonly used in exchanging text data between database and spreadsheet formats.