On Sat, Oct 6, 2012 at 11:56 PM, Steven D'Aprano <st...@pearwood.info> wrote: > > The C programming language on Unix systems. > > "ls" instead of "list"
"LS" is an abbreviation for "list segments", not "list". It goes back to Multics in the late 60s and 70s. In Multics, every segment is a file, and every file is a segment (basically a memory mapped file with an 18-bit address space, and using 36-bit words -- or 1.125 MiB) or a 28-bit, page-aligned 'windowed' segment -- or so I've read. It was quite an odd system compared to what I'm used to. But it was also fairly modern for a system developed in the late 60s -- it had hot swappable processors/peripherals, paged virtual memory, dynamic linking of segments/files into a process by symbolic (file system) pathname, process security rings (e.g. ring 0 for privileged supervisor code), directories and symbolic links in the file/segment tree, user access control lists, and who knows what else (I'm still reading a lot of the old papers available at multicians.org). _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
