circles replaced by square dots set on edge, the shape of the digit 0 in Eastern Arabic numerals. ASCII The ASCII code for the percent character is 37, or 0x25 in hexadecimal. In computers Names for the percent sign include percent sign (in ITU-T), mod, grapes (in hacker jargon) , and the humorous double-oh-seven (in INTERCAL). In computing, the percent character is also used for the modulo operation in programming languages that derive their syntax from the C programming language, which in turn acquired this usage from the earlier B. In the textual representation of URIs, a % immediately followed by a 2-digit hexadecimal number denotes an octet specifying (part of) a character that might otherwise not be allowed in URIs (see percent-encoding). In SQL, the percent sign is a wildcard character in "LIKE" expressions, for example SELECT * FROM table WHERE fullname LIKE 'Lisa %' will fetch all records whose names start with "". In TeX (and therefore also in LaTeX) and PostScript, and in GNU Octave and MATLAB, a % denotes a line comment. In BASIC, Visual Basic, ASP, and VBA a trailing % after a variable name marks it as an integer. In ASP, the percent sign can be used to indicate the start and end of the ASP code <%...... %> In Perl % is the sigil for hashes. In many programming languages' string formatting operations (performed by functions such as printf and scanf), the percent sign denotes parts of the template string that will be replaced with arguments. (See printf format string.) In Python and Ruby the percent sign is also used as the string formatting operator. In the command processors COMMAND.COM (DOS) and CMD.EXE (OS/2 and Windows), %1, %2,... stand for the first, second,... parameters of a batch file. %0 stands for the specification of the batch file itself as typed on the command line. The % sign is also used similarly in the FOR command. %VAR1% represents the value of an environment variable named VAR1. Thus: set PATH=c:\;%PATH% sets a new value for PATH, that being the old value preceded by "c:\;". Because these uses give the percent sign special meaning, the sequence %% (two percent signs) is used to represent a literal percent sign, so that: set PATH=c:\;%%PATH%% would set PATH to the literal value "c:\;%PATH%". In the C Shell, % is part of the default command prompt. In linguistics In linguistics,