confusion isn't exactly rampant
I guess so.
But while we're splitting hairs:
There simply are two meanings for the word "backup", which in and of
itself is nothing unusual, especially where one of them is the
ordinary sense of the term (not really a technical term).
In the IT domain, the "to save a duplicate copy" meaning of "to back up"
is so dominant that a request for disambiguation shouldn't surprise. And
if "to go back [in a string]" is an established expression
[...] "back up" seems to me the one expression that people dealing in
code point conversion and string access would use in this context.
it has become a technical term (so I guess it's defensible to keep it in
TUS), even if it's derived from figurative usage of what you do with
cars and horses.
Not something that TUS should redefine.
Redefinition of anything wasn't the request. Anyways, it's interesting
to note that algorithms operating with or making use of tree structures
also use "to backtrack". Related are "look-ahead" and "look-behind"
(regex lingo, though "to backtrack" is regex lingo too), but they don't
fit here.
Stephan