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List:       freebsd-questions
Subject:    Re: newbie question
From:       Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog () FreeBSD ! org>
Date:       2019-05-25 5:22:27
Message-ID: 20190525052227.GC46943 () eureka ! lemis ! com
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On Wednesday, 22 May 2019 at 22:05:34 -0700, Rodney W. Grimes wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 21 May 2019 at 21:10:38 -0700, Rodney W. Grimes wrote:
>>>> On Wednesday, 22 May 2019 at  1:36:24 +0300, Alexandru Goia wrote:
>>>>> greetings. how can do i get attuned in a logical manner with the
>>>>> *bsd/freebsd kernel source code ? thank you very much !
>>>>
>>>> Clearly you know how to get it (otherwise
>>>> https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ is your
>>>> friend).  To understand it better, I'd suggest reading "The Design and
>>>> Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System" by Kirk McKusick and
>>>> George Neville-Neil (Addison-Wesley).
>>>>
>>>> Understanding the code requires some work.  People will happily answer
>>>> detail questions, but you'll be responsible for finding out the
>>>> overall structure yourself.
>>>
>>> During a somewhat recent session of working with a not new,
>>> but also not seasoned developer, they noted a great deal of
>>> confusion when I was reading through and explaining code
>>> to them when I would actually read "pcb" on screen as
>>> "Process Control Block" when verbalizing it.  They could not
>>> see what I had just read to them.
>>
>> Heh.  I ran into something like this decades ago, using an "operating
>> system" that will be nameless.
>>
>> The program to copy files was... IEBCPY.  Most people pronounced it
>> "Eye Ee Bee Copy".  And some had their card decks returned after hours
>> of queueing to discover that some completion code (13?) saying "NOT
>> FOUND: IEBCOPY".
>
> I think your copy of OS/360 is borked, or is this one of the names
> they mangled in MVS?  I have a vague memory of JCL that had those
> types of issues.

Yes, this was MVS.  I'm pretty sure that they didn't deliberately make
things worse than they were.

>> Clearly, we decided, pronouncing names for what they mean is *bad*.
>> From then on I spelt names out, or at least tried to pronounce them
>> the way they're spelt ("Eye Ee Bee Cpy").  It confuse[ds] people, but
>> it avoided some misunderstandings.
>
> Pronouncing spellings is bad, yes, but that is not what I was
> doing.  I was pronouncing the proper full names, usually as
> defined either in "The design and implementation book" or in
> the code comments themselves.

Yes, but the approach is similar.
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