Pretty sure q came first and was resurrected later. The system, applied
rigorously, was to pick something that worked without conflict each time.
Ken usually picked.
-rob
On Wed, Feb 5, 2020 at 8:50 PM Angelo Papenhoff <aap(a)papnet.eu> wrote:
On 05/02/20, Rob Pike wrote:
Also a side note about vi: Plan 9 had another
program with that name.
http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/1/vi. The 'v' meant mips for obscure but
consistent reasons. Yet another reason the command was pronounced V.I.
regardless of its function.
Actually now i wonder, was there a system behind those characters?
These are all i could find (roughly in order of appearance):
2 68020
8 i386
v mips
k sparc
z hobbit
6 i960
x AT&T 3210
1 68000
9 AMD 29000
q ppc
7 alpha
5 ARM (7500)
6 amd64
9 ppc64
0 mips little endian
There's a '2' in '68020' and an '8' in '386'
and maybe i can understand
'k' as sparK, but why is v mips or q powerpc?
aap