The slash is an oblique slanting line. Unicode encodes it in four separate forms: the punctuation mark solidus (/), its East Asian equivalent the fullwidth solidus (／), the mathematical operator division slash (∕), and the mathematical mark fraction slash (⁄). Once used to mark periods and commas, the slash is now most often used to represent exclusive or inclusive or, division and fractions, and as a date separator. It has several other historical or technical names.