On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 3:16 PM, Gord Tomlin <[email protected] > wrote:
> On 2013-11-06 15:06, DASDBILL2 wrote: > >> My first thought when I see "cp" is "central processor." >> >> How about using "NIO" as an alias of "cp" (meaning "copy"), where "NIO" >> stands for "Not Intuitively Obvious"? "cpy" is much more intuitively >> obvious to me than "cp". >> >> Our MVS world is not without similar egregious examples. E.g, some of >> the operator/user commands for Omegamon were very cryptic. >> > > Omegamon did have some, uh, strange commands. > > cp is not among the more obscure names chosen for Unix/Linux commands. At > least the letters of the command can be found in the word "copy". > > It certainly isn't intuitive that if I want to search the files in a > directory for occurrences of a string that the command I would want is > grep. Or how about flex/bison? And please don't ask me to finger a user. > grep stands for General Regular Expression Program. flex is, I think "fast lex". And "lex" generates a "lexer" which is model C code to do a lexical analysis of a language based on BNF formulas. bison is weird. And I can guess at the pun chain. Original program is "yacc" (Yet Another Compiler Compiler"). Well,that is pronounced the same as Yak. Which is a long haired bovid from Asia. A bison is an American bovid, but "not as hairy". So bison is a compiler compiler like yacc, but is not as "hairy". Some people in UNIX are "different". > > Thank goodness IBM did not choose to prefix all their commands with "ya" > for "yet another". > > -- > > Regards, Gord Tomlin > Action Software International > (a division of Mazda Computer Corporation) > Tel: (905) 470-7113, Fax: (905) 470-6507 > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN > -- This is clearly another case of too many mad scientists, and not enough hunchbacks. Maranatha! <>< John McKown ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
