On 2016-07-11 04:00, John Cowan <cowan(a)mercury.ccil.org> wrote:
> Johnny Billquist scripsit:
>> > Uh. I'm no language expert, but that seems rather stretched. English
>> > comes from Old English, which have a lot more in common with
>> > Scandinavian languages, and they are all Germanic languages. Which
>> > means they all share a common root.
> Absolutely.
>
>> > What makes you say then that all the others borrowed it from
>> > English?
> Because when words change, they change according to common patterns
> specific to the language. For example, a change between Old English (OE)
> and Modern English (ModE) is that long-a has become long-o. Consequently,
> the descendants of OE bát, tá, ác are ModE boat, toe, oak. In Scots,
> which is also descended from OE, this change did not operate, and long-a
> changed in the Great Vowel Shift along with long-a from other sources,
> giving the Older Scots words bait, tae, eik. However, current Scots
> does not use bait, but rather boat, and we can see that because this
> breaks the pattern it must be a borrowing from English.
So the obvious question then becomes: Are you saying that Old English
also borrowed the word from English?
(See http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=boat)
>> > (I assume you know why Port and Starboard are named that way...)
> OE steor 'steering oar, rudder' + bord 'side of a ship'. Parallel
> formations gave us common Scandinavian styrbord from ON stjórnborði,
> similarly Dutch stuurbord, German Steuerbord. Larboard, the other side,
> began life as Middle English ladde 'load' + bord, because it was the side
> you loaded a ship from, and was altered under the influence of starboard.
> Because the two were easily confused, port officially replaced it in the
> 19C, though it had been used in this meaning since the 16C.
Well, in Scandinavian the port side is called "babord", which comes from
bare board, since that was the "clean" side, which you could dock on. No
rudder to break... And it's from way before medieval times... But I'm
pretty sure the term is from even before the Vikings were around.
Johnny
I suspect Yanks being pedantic about `slash' versus `forward slash'
would give an Englishman a stroke.
If that's too oblique for some of you, I can't help.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
after the brief but illuminating detour on character sets and the
evolution of human languages, we now return you to the Unix Heritage
mailing list :-)
[ Please! ]
Cheers, Warren
If 19961 is the oldest citation the OED can come up with, "slash"
really is a coinage of the computer age. Yet the character had
been in algebra books for centuries. The oral tradition that underlies
eqn would be the authority for a "solid" name. I suspect, though,
that regardless of what the algebra books called it, the name
would be "divided by".
This is sheer hypothesis, but I have always thought that \ got
onto printer chains and type balls as a crude drawing aid. Ditto
for |. Once the characters became available people began to find
uses for them.
On 2016-07-10 02:52, John Cowan <cowan(a)mercury.ccil.org> wrote:
> Steffen Nurpmeso scripsit:
>> > "Die Segel streichen" (Taking in the sails),
> "Striking the sails" in technical English. All the nations around the
> North and Baltic Seas exchanged their vocabularies like diseases, and if
> we didn't have records of their earlier histories, we would know they
> were related but we'd never figure out exactly how. For example, it
> can be shown that French bateau, German Boot, common Scandinavian båt,
> Irish bád, Scottish Gaelic bà ta, Scots boat, and the equivalents in
> the various Frisian languages are none of them original native words:
> they all were borrowed from English boat.
Uh. I'm no language expert, but that seems rather stretched. English
comes from Old English, which have a lot more in common with
Scandinavian languages, and they are all Germanic languages. Which means
they all share a common root.
What makes you say then that all the others borrowed it from English? I
would guess/suspect that the term is older than English itself, and the
similarity of the word in the different languages comes from the fact
that it's old enough to have been around when all these languages were
closer to the roots and each other. Boats have been around for much
longer than the English language so I would suspect some term for them
have been around for a long time too...
If you ask me, you all got most terms from the Vikings anyway, who were
the first good seafarers... :-)
(I assume you know why Port and Starboard are named that way...)
Johnny
--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt(a)softjar.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
Steffen Nurpmeso:
...and that actually makes me wonder why the engineers that
created what became POSIX preferred slash instead -- i hope it is
not the proud of high skills in using (maybe light) sabers that
some people of the engineer community seem to foster. But it
could be the sober truth. Or, it could be a bug caused by
inconsideration. And that seems very likely now.
====
It had nothing to do with engineers. `Slash' for / has been
conventional American usage for as long as I can remember,
dating back well before POSIX or UNIX or the movie that made
a meme of light sabers.
It's unclear exactly how far back it dates. The earliest
OED citation for `slash' as `A thin sloping line, thus /'
is dated 1961; but the cite is from Webster's 3rd.
Given the amount of violence prevalent in American metaphor,
it is hardly noteworthy.
Make American Language Violent Again (and I HATE MOSQUITOS*).
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
* If you don't know what this refers to, you probably don't
want to know.
On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 7:09 AM, Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen(a)sdaoden.eu> wrote:
> ...and that actually makes me wonder why the engineers that
> created what became POSIX preferred slash instead
>
​I can not speak for anyone else. But at the time when I was a part of
the /usr/group UNIX standards** mtgs I personally do not believe I had
ever heard of the term "​solidus." Such a term maybe had been used in my
first form Latin classes from the 1960s, but by the 1980s I had long ago
forgotten any/all of my Latin. I certainly did not try to remember it as a
computer professional.
In those days many of us, including me, did (and still do) refer to the
asterisk as "splat" and the exclamation point as "bang" from the sound
made by them when they printed yellow oiled paper @ 10 cps from the console
TTY. But slash was what we called the character that is now next to the
shift key on modern keyboards. I do not remember ever using, much less
needed to refer to, the character "back slash" until the unfortunate crap
that the folks in Redmond forced on the industry. Although interestingly
enough, the vertical bar or UNIX "pipe" symbol was used and discussed
freely in those days. I find it interesting that Redmond-ism became the
unshifted character, not the vertical bar by the shear force of economics
of the PC.
Clem
** For those that do not know (my apologies to those that do) the 1985
/usr/group standards committee was the forerunner to IEEE P1003. Which we
published as the first "official UNIX API standard agreed by the community"
(I still have a hardcopy). But neither /usr/group nor USENIX had the
political authority to bring an official standard to FIPS, ANSI, ECMA, ISO
or like, while IEEE did. So a few months before the last meeting, Jim
Issak petitioned IEEE for standards status, and the last meeting of the
/usr/group UNIX standards meeting was very short -- about 10 minutes. We
voted to disband and then everyone in the room officially reformed a few
minutes later all signing in as IEEE P1003, later to be called POSIX. For
further historical note, I was a "founding member" of both groups and the
editor of a number of early drafts (numbers 5-11 IIRC), as well as the
primary author of the Tape Format and Terminal I/O sections of P1003.1.
With Keith Bostic, I would later be part of the P1003.2 and pen the
original PAX compromise. After that whole mess I was so disgusted with the
politics of the effort, I stopping going to the POSIX mtgs.
PPS While I did not work for them at the time, you can blame DEC for the
mess with the case/character sets in the POSIX & FIPS standards. A number
of the compromises in the standard documents were forced by VMS, 7-bit
(case insensitivity) being the prime one. While we did get in the
rational section of document that it was suggested/advised that systems
implementations and applications code be case insensitive and 8 bit clean
so that other character sets could be supported. However the DEC folks
were firmly against anything more than 7-bit ASCII and supporting anything
in that character set. My memory is that the IBM folks were silent at the
time and just let the DEC guys carry the torch for 1960's 7-bit US English.
Thanks for reminding me about that one, Clem. I think I even have
Darnell's book somewhere.
I haven't decided what to do about batch interpreters for C. They aren't
interactive but there is still some overlap of concerns. I'll probably
post a list of them somewhere. I also have Al Stevens' Quincy,
Przemyslaw Podsiadly's SeeR, and Herb Schildt's from "Building your own
C interpreter."
On Wed, Jul 6, 2016, at 12:22 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
> From the The Unix Historical Society mailing list, I discovered your
> historical interest in C interpreters. It looks like you are missing at
> least one, so I though I would introduce you all.
>
> Paul/Wendell meet Peter Darnell -- Pete wrote one an early C interpreter
> for his C programming book. I'll leave it to you folks to discuss what
> he
> did, its current status et al.
>
> Best Wishes,
>
> Clem Cole (old time UNIX and C guy)
>
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Warren Toomey <wkt(a)tuhs.org>
> Date: Sat, Jul 2, 2016 at 6:01 PM
> Subject: [TUHS] Interactive C Environments
> To: tuhs(a)tuhs.org
>
>
> All, I've been asked by Wendell to forward this query about C
> interpreters to the mailing list for him.
>
> ----- Forwarded message from Wendell P <wendellp(a)operamail.com> -----
>
> I have a project at softwarepreservation.org to collect work done,
> mostly in the 1970s and 80s, on C interpreters.
>
> http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/interactive_c
>
> One thing I'm trying to track down is Cin, the C interpreter in UNIX
> v10. I found the man page online and the tutorial in v2 of the Saunders
> book, but that's it. Can anyone help me to find files or docs?
>
> BTW, if you have anything related to the other commercial systems
> listed, I'd like to hear. I've found that in nearly all cases, the
> original developers did not keep the files or papers.
>
> Cheers,
> Wendell
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----
--
http://www.fastmail.com - The professional email service
Clem Cole:
I do not remember ever using, much less
needed to refer to, the character "back slash" until the unfortunate crap
that the folks in Redmond forced on the industry.
=====
Oh, come on. You programmed in C. You probably used
UNIX back when @ was the default kill character (though
I doubt you're odd enough still to use that kill character,
as I do). You surely used troff, LaTeX, or both, and have
doubtless sworn at regular expressions more often than
most of the young Linux crowd have had chocolate bars.
I think you've just forgotten it out of PBSD (post-backlash
stress disorder, nothing to do with Berkeley).
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
UNIX\(tm old fart who swore at a regexp just yesterday
Greg Lehey:
And why? Yes, the 8088 was a reasonably fast processor, so fast that
they could slow it down a little so that they could use the same
crystal to create the clock both for the CPU and the USART. But the
base system had only 16 kB memory, only a little more than half the
size of the 6th Edition kernel. Even without the issue of disks
(which could potentially have been worked around) it really wasn't big
enough for a multiprogramming OS.
=====
Those who remember the earliest UNIX (even if few of us have
used it) might disagree with that. Neither the PDP-7 nor the
PDP-11/20 on which UNIX was born had memory management: a
context switch was a swap. That would have been pretty slow
on floppies, so perhaps it wouldn't have been saleable, but
it was certainly possible.
In fact Heinz Lycklama revived the idea in the V6 era to
create LSX, a UNIX for the early LSI-11 which had no
memory management and a single ca. 300kiB floppy drive.
It had more memory than the 8088 system, though: 20kiW,
i.e. 40kiB. Even so, Lycklama did quite a bit of work to
squeeze the kernel down, reduce the number of processes
and context switches, and so on.
Here's a link to one of his papers on the system:
https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/afips/1977/5085/00/50850237.pdf
I suspect it would have been possible to make a XENIX
that would have worked on that hardware. Whether it
would have worked well enough to sell is another question.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
