Diode polarity

[ken]

I can see why all of this might be confusing. I don't have a background in electronics but instead mine is in chemistry. There's a related area to the above in chemistry and that's in the electrolysis of molten or aqueous salts. As you might remember from school the positive electrode is the anode and the negative the cathode. However, the ion that migrates to the anode is negatively charged but is called the anion. Likewise the cation is positively charged. This caused confusion for some. Also what happened at each electrode in terms of ion electron half equations caused problems. The chemists were supposed to stick to a convention which helped. I'm not sure that there is a convention, in terms of the marking of components, to which everybody sticks but I'm open to correction here.

Regards,

Ken.