On 2024-04-01 03:47, Martin D Kealey wrote:
On Thu, 25 Jan 2024, 20:04 Alan Urmancheev, <alan.ur...@gmail.com>
wrote:
Currently, Bash's manual definitions section mentions POSIX, but
doesn't
explain what that abbreviature stands for
...
I think that abbreviatures can be confusing, especially when you don't
get
to know what they stand for.
I suspect this confusion arises from a pattern that's common in some
other
languages but not in English. In English a name generally does not
"mean"
anything (*1); and most native speakers generally feel no compelling
desire
to dissect a name to figure out its "meaning". (Heck, we don't even
dissect
idiomatic phrases into their separate words, leading to English being
mildly agglutinative. (e.g. "hairdo", "login", "setup", "today".))
Nonsense. I'm a native English speaker, and I always look into what
acronyms mean. GNU standards "GNU's not Unix", and that's off the top
of my
head. The recursion was a joke by the original author of the term.
The phrase "Portable Operating System Interface" is *less* meaningful
to
most English speakers, and in practice is only used to answer the
question
"what does POSIX stand for". (That's why the Wikipedia title «Portable
Operating System Interface
<https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Portable_Operating_System_Interface&redirect=no>»
redirects to "POSIX" and not the other way around.)
Nonsense.
Therefore, I propose to add the meaning of the abbreviature to the
manual.
That's going to be tricky, since like most English names, it does not
*mean*
anything. Rather, it has a referent, which is ISO/IEC 9945.
Nonsense.
The name "POSIX" was adopted largely because it was more memorable and
easier to pronounce than alternatives that were suggested at the time,
and
forty year later that's the name it's universally known by. The history
is
a bit unclear on this point, but it seems likely that POSIX was coined
first, and then the retronym "Portable Operating System Interface" was
coined to match it a few minutes later.
Most English speakers find "explanations of names" to be distractions
rather than helping, so if you REALLY want to add this, can it please
NOT
be right next to the first use of the word "POSIX". For example as an
end-note. (If this were MarkDown or HyperText, I'd say "put a link and
nothing else", but unfortunately man pages are written in ROFF, so
links
aren't easily accessible.)
Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense.
(«portable operating system interface X», or something like that).
Close, but no; the «X» does not abbreviate anything; it's there because
in
the 1980's it was customary for Unix-like operating systems to have
block-capital names ending with «IX». Maybe *that* should go in the
explanation.
I suggest an explanation more along the lines of «POSIX is a suite of
standards endorsed jointly by the International Standards Organisation
(
ISO.org) and the International Electro-technical Commission (IEC.ch) as
ISO/IEC 9945. The current revision is POSIX-1-2017, based on ISO/IEC
9945-2008 with technical corrigenda. Further information is available
at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX».
-Martin (Martin's Adroit Recursive Turing Implementing Noggin) (*3)
Just include the term that the acronym standards for near the first
occurrence of the term in the documentation. Nothing could be simpler.
--
Yorick
