newbie question

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

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.
--
When replying to this message, please copy the original recipients.
If you don't, I may ignore the reply or reply to the original recipients.
For more information, see http://www.lemis.com/questions.html
Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger grog at FreeBSD.org for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
This message is digitally signed.  If your Microsoft mail program
reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 163 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/attachments/20190525/143d74c6/attachment.sig>