26 Mar
2016
26 Mar
'16
3:29 a.m.
On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 05:43:08PM +0300, Aharon Robbins wrote:
One of Unix's signature hallmarks is its
terseness: short command names
like mv, ln, cp, cc, ed; short options (a dash and a single letter),
programs with just a few, if any, options at all, and short path names:
"usr" instead of "user", "src" instead of
"source" and so on.
I have long theorized that the reason for the short names is that since
typing was so physically demanding, it was natural to make the command
names (and all the rest) be short and easier to type. I don't know if
this was a conscious decision, but I suspect it more likely to have been
an unconscious / natural one.
I'm going to throw in an aside at this point. PDP-7 Unix packed 2 characters
per 18-bit word. So, when comparing things, it's easy to compare one
word against another. I believe this is why command-line options were
2 characters (e.g. -l, -v, -c, -d) etc.
Cheers, Warren