〈English Idiom in Unix: Directory Recursively〉
http://xahlee.org/comp/idiom_directory_recursively.html
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English Idiom in Unix: Directory Recursively
Xah Lee, 2011-05-17
Today, let's discuss something in the category of lingustics.
You know how in unix
AFAICS what emacs calls "recursive delete" is what the ordinary person
would simply call "delete". Presumably the non-recursive delete is
called simply "delete" but is actually something more complicated than
delete, and you're supposed to know what that is.
The "non-recursive delete" would be
I think what happens is that the “recursive” has become a idiom associated with
directory to such a degree that the unix people don't know what the fuck they
are talking about. They just simply use the word to go with directory whever
they mean the whole directory.
In the emacs case: “Recursiv
The supposed inefficiency of recursive implementations is based
largely on the properties of hardware that is now obsolete. With
modern processors there's no great efficiency hit. In some of the
smaller microcontrollers, it's true, you do have to worry about stack
overflow; but the ARM processo
