I got a new computer at work which has Windows XP as its OS. I discovered today that the character map which comes with this version of Windows is larger and arranged differently than the character map on Win versions I have used (the one I'm using now at home is Win98). Also, it has a label if you set the cursor on a letter or symbol which tells you what it is. By going over the letters and characters, I found some rather interesting names, some of which I've never heard of.

/ is called solidus. (I've always called it slash, maybe forward slash to distinguish it from
\ reverse solidus. (Backslash to me.)
{} curly brackets, as opposed to
[] square brackets
«» left- and right-pointing double quotation marks (also comes in a single version)
¶ pilcrow
Ðð Latin eth
Þþ Latin thorn
ß Latin small sharp s (in my German class, we called it es-zet). often taken as B by those who don't know German
; Greek question mark (yes, that's right -- in Greek the semicolon is used as question mark)

There are several which I can't replicate here because my version doesn't have them.
the caron is an upside down circumflex written over a letter
the ogonek is a small mark like L with no serifs which I take it is written under a letter, sort of like the Greek subscripts (don't know what language use this)
the schwa and the euro sign are represented; I don't have them
the eng, a letter which looks like a script n with the right stroke extended down like a j. Not sure what this is used for.
the dotless i is used, I believe, in Turkish.

Finally, I note that ñ is called n with tilde, which is silly. In Spanish, it's a separate letter called eñe, just as ll is called elle and is also considered a separate letter. I'm surprised the map doesn't have ll by itself.

The new map has the entire Greek alphabet; the entire Cyrillic alphabet including special versions of some letters used, for instance, only in Ukrainian etc; the entire Hebrew alphabet and the entire Arabic alphabet.

Which brings me to a question which I'm sure some of you can answer: how do you get a computer to write right to left if you want to write in Hebrew or Arabic? Or here's another question I would be glad to be enlightened on: how do computers write in Chinese or Japanese or other pictographic systems?