Re: Manual: clarify what POSIX stands for

[Chet Ramey]

On 3/31/24 8:47 PM, Martin D Kealey wrote:
> On Thu, 25 Jan 2024, 20:04 Alan Urmancheev, <alan.urman@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.

I'm comfortable with the paragraphs in the devel branch version of the
texinfo manual. Those aren't appropriate for the man page; maybe a
sentence there.

--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/

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