There is something to be said for Chris Mason's point of view.
It is useful, even highly desirable to provide enough context to disambiguate
an acronym when it has several senses in common use among the members of some
group, readers of IBM-MAIN posts, say.
Consider now the acronyms and interpretation pairs:
SMF
Société Mathématique de France
System Management Facility
IDR
Identification Record
Informal Dispute Resolution
ACM
Association for Computing Machinery
Academy of Country Music
PLO
Palestine Liberation Organization
Perform Locked Operation
DNB
Dance Notation Bureau
Dictionary of National Biography
ADL
Australia Development Laboratory (IBM, Perth)
Arthur D. Little Inc. (Boston)
OSS
Open Source Software
Office of Strategic Services
POK
Partially Ordered Knapsack [problem]
Poughkeepsie [chiefly within IBM]
I have chosen these acronyms and interpretation pairs because---while I can
image contexts in which without disambiguation one interpretation could be
confused with the other---global context is usually sufficient to disentangle
them.
Here on IBM-MAIN it would, I think, be good practice
o to avoid ambiguous acronyms in captions, and
o to explicate an acronym the first time it is used, as in . . . Perform Locked
Operation (PLO) . . .
after which, PLO, having been locally disambiguated, can be used freely.
John Gilmore Ashland, MA 01721-1817 USA
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