On Wed, Feb 17, 2021 at 11:13:08AM +1300, Greg Ewing wrote: > On 17/02/21 7:10 am, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > >"It's Greek letter, like pi that you may remember from maths > >class. In some technical computer science, the Greek L, lambda, is used > >as the symbol for functions." > > The most accurate answer seems to be "Because somebody made > a mistake transcribing a mathematics paper many years ago." :-)
Not according to Alonzo Church, who at various times has stated that it was either more or less chosen at random, or that it was derived from Whitehead and Russell's x̂ (x-hat) via ∧x to λx to make it easier for the printers. Either way it wasn't a mistake, but a deliberate choice. It is really remarkable how much attention lambda gets. As far as I know, mathematicians don't ask why Hilbert chose epsilon for his epsilon calculus, and nobody ever asks where "byte" comes from. It is, apparently, a deliberate misspelling of bite, to avoid it being accidently changed to bit. But why *bite*? The first published use of "byte" apparently was in a 1956 IBM memo by Werner Buchholz: "[…] Most important, from the point of view of editing, will be the ability to handle any characters or digits, from 1 to 6 bits long. Figure 2 shows the Shift Matrix to be used to convert a 60-bit word, coming from Memory in parallel, into characters, or 'bytes' as we have called them, to be sent to the Adder serially." The memo already shows that Buchholz and IBM were thinking of multiple bits being a "word", so it's not clear why bytes. There's no ordinary sense that a collection of bits (as in "a bit of stuff") is considered "a bite". Language is fun. -- Steve _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/SAIVWEGHB33IV6UM5JN2U2C333U4P6PP/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
