> On Mon, 12 Jan 1998, C. Scott Ananian wrote:
> > And "/dev/disk" isn't english-centric? What does "/dev" mean for all
> > those non-English-speakers? Does "sd" not stand for "SCSI Disk"?
> > I think this reasoning is suspect.
[...]
> Translating a word is easy, I read it, I get the meaning.
>
> But guessing, as a non-native-English-speaking person, what word a letter
> might stand for is nowhere near being intuitive. Put dots in between or
> nothing and all. And write a nice manpage.
What does '/dev' mean? What dictionary or manpage is that found in?
What does 'sda' stand for? And where is that man page?
I agree with you that english acronyms are unfriendly to the non-native
speaker, but the kernel (and computer science in general) is littered with
them. For those of us who can remember that 'd1p2' stands for disk 1,
partition 2, abbreviation makes a lot of sense.
But I'm not the one coding /devfs, so my opinion is really irrelevant.
[further discussion either off-list, with Richard Gooch personally (who
*is* doing the coding), or with Linus Torvalds (because his opinions,
unlike mine, do matter)]
--Scott
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Laboratory for Computer Science/Crypto / without hindrance.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology /META-PARRESIAS AKOLUTOS:Acts 28:31
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