On Thu, 25 Jan 2024, 20:04 Alan Urmancheev, <alan.ur...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Currently, Bash's manual definitions section mentions POSIX, but doesn't > explain what that abbreviature stands for ... > I think that abbreviatures can be confusing, especially when you don't get > to know what they stand for. > I suspect this confusion arises from a pattern that's common in some other languages but not in English. In English a name generally does not "mean" anything (*1); and most native speakers generally feel no compelling desire to dissect a name to figure out its "meaning". (Heck, we don't even dissect idiomatic phrases into their separate words, leading to English being mildly agglutinative. (e.g. "hairdo", "login", "setup", "today".)) The phrase "Portable Operating System Interface" is *less* meaningful to most English speakers, and in practice is only used to answer the question "what does POSIX stand for". (That's why the Wikipedia title «Portable Operating System Interface <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Portable_Operating_System_Interface&redirect=no>» redirects to "POSIX" and not the other way around.) Therefore, I propose to add the meaning of the abbreviature to the manual. That's going to be tricky, since like most English names, it does not *mean* anything. Rather, it has a referent, which is ISO/IEC 9945. The name "POSIX" was adopted largely because it was more memorable and easier to pronounce than alternatives that were suggested at the time, and forty year later that's the name it's universally known by. The history is a bit unclear on this point, but it seems likely that POSIX was coined first, and then the retronym "Portable Operating System Interface" was coined to match it a few minutes later. Most English speakers find "explanations of names" to be distractions rather than helping, so if you REALLY want to add this, can it please NOT be right next to the first use of the word "POSIX". For example as an end-note. (If this were MarkDown or HyperText, I'd say "put a link and nothing else", but unfortunately man pages are written in ROFF, so links aren't easily accessible.) («portable operating system interface X», or something like that). Close, but no; the «X» does not abbreviate anything; it's there because in the 1980's it was customary for Unix-like operating systems to have block-capital names ending with «IX». Maybe *that* should go in the explanation. I suggest an explanation more along the lines of «POSIX is a suite of standards endorsed jointly by the International Standards Organisation ( ISO.org) and the International Electro-technical Commission (IEC.ch) as ISO/IEC 9945. The current revision is POSIX-1-2017, based on ISO/IEC 9945-2008 with technical corrigenda. Further information is available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX». -Martin (Martin's Adroit Recursive Turing Implementing Noggin) (*3) PS: (*1) I dare you to ask what "GNU" stands for. Or "UNIX". (*2) no, we don't insert "ISO is short for blah blah", because that is *also* not part of the name of the standard. (*3) https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Posix%2CPOSIX%2CPortable+Operating+System%2CPortable+Operating+System+Interface&year_start=1960&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 >
