12 Jan
2022
12 Jan
'22
6:53 p.m.
Ralph Corderoy writes:
Hi Jon,
Yeah, I looked it up too. Yes, the argument can be made that one of the
definitions can be forced to sort of fit; I'm guessing that #3 didn't
exist when troff was written. So I'm gonna stick to my point that using
that word is awkward and makes the document a bit harder to understand.
Especially in the context of programming languages, of which troff is one.
To the best of my knowledge, nobody talks about "a = b;" as interpolating b.
I never understood "interpolating a
register" to have any relation to
the definition of interpolate that I learned in math.
The first definition makes sense of it:
1. (transitive, intransitive) To introduce (something) between other
things; especially to insert (possibly spurious) words into a text.
in verse 74, the second line is clearly interpolated
2. (mathematics) To estimate the value of a function between two
tabulated points.
3. (computing) During the course of processing some data, and in
response to a directive in that data, to fetch data from a different
source and process it in-line along with the original data.
― https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/interpolate
--
Cheers, Ralph.