Its full name was peso de ocho reales (or “piece of 8 reales”), and, as its name suggests, it was worth eight items of the true, the former commonplace. Some have due to this fact speculated that the $ symbol arose as a stylistic variation on the Arabic numeral 8, though no documents have surfaced that show 8 being used to symbolize the Spanish greenback. Outside of foreign money, the dollar sign is used as a common sigil (symbol for a variable) in plenty of pc programming languages, together with Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC) and a number of other scripting langua