Really? I use 12# all the time. I had it beaten into me when I was learning structural engineering, since there were a LOT of pound forces to deal with, and it’s a little more recognizable than lb. Now I use it in my grocery lists, too. In fact, I don’t think I use #12 at all, only 12#.
FWIW, I’m a current engineering student, and I’ve only seen “#” to represent “pound force” in one class, and that was taught by a very old professor (he had to be at least 70). In all my other classes we’ve used “lb.” or “lbf.”
Obviously they mean that 100 is stored as a double-length integer.
Huh. We never used # to represent pounds. Admittedly, we mostly use newtons and such, but if we did use pounds, it was abbreviated lb.
I only started hearing ‘pound’ for # in the context of phone-answering systems within the last ten years or so (the “pound key”) and suspect that it survives here because it is one syllable to match ‘star’ for *, and because much of our phone equipment was made in the States.
If I bought school supplies in bulk, I’d ask for 2# of #2 pencils. 
No no, they clearly were trying to find the remainder of the integer value of their post and 100.
In all seriousness, in 3rd grade I was taught %number is correct, I haven’t used it since… eh… 3rd grade, but some people may be taught that way, for whatever reason.
You’d ask for Two Hash of No. 2 Pencils?
Huh. I always assumed that ‘#’ was called “the pound sign” because whenever some blasted recorded voice on a telephone asked you to use it, you were nearing the point of wanting to pound that mark into the forehead of the owner of said voice.
And, as a bonus for your troubles, you could use it to mean “number __”
In India, the currency abbreviation can go either before or after the amount and it is read as written. If it is written “Rs. 50,” then they read it “rupees fifty.” If it is written “50 Rs.,” then they read it as “fifty rupees.”
You may use # into indicate a number of things, (each getting a unique name), as the Willard Espy poem I have posted a few times indicates:
I bought a Quebec Nordiques guernsey at a second-hand shop in Newtown. I have since established that the number of Quebecois ex-pats in Sydney is higher than you’d think.
I think I’ve given most of them tetanus trying to speak French at them.
I’ll take your word on it; I don’t live in Sydney. 
Someone at my previous job discovered I had spent several years learning French in High School and had visited France a couple of times, and I ended up as the Designated France-Talking Guy whenever we’d get tourists from New Caledonia or Tahiti in (which was surprisingly often).
French has never been a particularly popular language to learn in Australia for some reason, so being able to tell a tourist from New Caledonia that Une carte de la mémoire 1gb pour un appareil photo digital coûte $45 was an excellent way to make sales for us. But my French accent is atrocious, and they had this odd mixture of horror and relief on their faces when I started talking to them- “Mon Dieu! What has he done with our beloved language?!” quickly giving way to “Wait, he speaks French! That means he can help us get Papa’s digital camera working again! Hurrah!”
But yeah, I know what you mean.
Of the dead languages it’s probably more popular than Classical Greek, less so than Latin.
Similar experience on the opposite side of the coin - a friend had encouraged me to come on a cruise for which I still haven’t forgiven him and we were in Noumea for the day. I was approached by a guy with a stupid hat, an unfolded map, a phrasebook and a Kiwi accent who started off “Pardonney moy, munser, ou est ler…”
I broke in - “Would it be easier to do this in English, mate?”
His face lit up. He was over the moon. Suddenly high on life.
“That’d be great! Could you tell me where the Place des [pronounced “Pless dus”] Cocotiers is?”
“No idea, sorry - I only got here ten minutes ago.”
I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone’s face reflect so total a reversal of fortune in less than thirty seconds.
Hé! Je ressemble à cette rémarque! I just have to keep remembering that not everywhere is French as politically important as in Canada.
I had an experience like that in Vancouver.
I had just gotten off the bus from Banff and met my friend. We leave the terminal, walk across the park, and enter the Skytrain station. My friend is explaining the ticket machine to me, when I hear a voice from behind me. It’s a local reporter doing a feature on the transit system. “Would you like to give us your impression of the Skytrain?” “I’d be glad to, but this is the first time I’ve ever been on it and I just got here five minutes ago…”.
OK, OK, that line was extracting the urine.
But in high school it’s actually pretty much treated like one. It’s not seen as a “business” language (viz. Japanese, Mandarin, German, Korean) or a “neighbourhood” language (Indonesian, Vietnamese, putting on bad New Zealand accents) so the kids that do it at school tend to do it because they’re either French or second-generation (i.e. free marks) or they do it for the same reason one would do Latin or Classical Greek.
Here, every English-speaker gets French in public school. It’s mandatory. I presume French-speakers get English, but given the political realities of Quebec, I wouldn’t be certain about that. In English-speaking areas, a lot of people send their kids to French immersion, and rely on the surrounding culture to give them English.
The arguments start over third languages. When I was in high school, the third language was German. I looked at the website and course catalogue of my high school, and these days the third language is Spanish, which I find rather interesting. A lot of people study the languages of their families (Chinese, Punjabi, etc, etc.) or of their new SO. Language geeks tend to take things like Latin, or Japanese (along with the really serious anime geeks). Then there are the loons who study Esperanto.
Not only is it a perfectly serviceable place name, but Banff also makes a great written sound effect.
“Pow! Splot! BANFF!”
I’m a Linguistics major, so I totally understand that those two groups are not mutually exclusive. (You should see some of my friends.) But I figure you’d have to be a language geek to study Esperanto. I mean, I’m fascinated by the minutae of syntax and morphology and even I can’t pretend to care about Esperanto.
Wait–what the hell? They taught Esperanto at your high school? Man, Canada is weird/awesome.
Hostile Dialect,
Hostile Dialect, Narcissist
Of course we do. When I was in school, ESL courses started in fourth grade, but today it’s in first grade. There has been talk to teach some classes (history, math) in English even in French-language schools, but I don’t know if this will lead to anything. And some have even suggested Quebec move from dual French- and English-language school systems to a single system with something like 70% of school time in French and 30% in English. I think it’d be a great idea, but I don’t know if it’s even constitutional.
My high school offered Spanish as a third language. My cégep gave the choice between Spanish and German. But learning a third language isn’t compulsory in schools here. I expect most francophone Quebecers who learn a third language will learn Spanish, seeing how it is a major North American language and it has many similarities with French. I did learn some Spanish, but not much and since I never use it, I’m not going to become any good at it. I think it’s the same for you guys and French: as you said you learn it in school, but if you don’t use it afterward you soon lose it all.
I wish. Sadly, we’re not that awesome. I had to wait till college for that*. They did have a book on Japanese in the high-school library, though.
HJ, I’m expecting more and more high schools to offer Chinese. So far, my old high school hasn’t. But there are so many private language schools out there that maybe they’re taking up the slack.
[sub]*Sheridan College had a book on Esperanto. I got into it for about three days in 1984, then I had an exam or something and totally forgot about it for fifteen years. Then I found Esperanto again on the net and now I speak it. [/sub]