Topic: Pair Symbol Standard Proposal: BTC/LTC == LTC_BTC (Read 437 times)

As altcoins expand and as prices are increasingly offered in terms of cryptocurrencies other than BTC, it would be advantageous to standardize on a slash notation (eg: BTC/LTC) that is the inverse of the underscore notation (eg: LTC_BTC) for the following reasons:

The underscore notation is already in wide use to mean that a price in that symbol is going to be of the first currency expressed in terms of the second currency.

The slash notation is used everywhere else to mean division, so that a price in that symbol is going to be of the denominator currency expressed in terms of the numerator currency.

This will allow sites, such as cryptsy.com to correct their user interfaces, which currently use the slash to mean the same as the underscore, by simply substituting underscore for slash in those user interfaces without changing anything else.  The APIs generally already use the underscore symbol for pair specification on queries to the APIs so there should be no conversion necessary.  However, some APIs output responses to queries using slash where there should be an underscore, according to this proposed standard.  This will require a change in the output standard used which will require a new version of the API be provided.  Among the ways this can perhaps be simplified is an account setting, a change in the subdomain name, a change in the http path or an explicit API version argument.