newbie question

[Rodney W. Grimes]

> 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.

> 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.

I was not saying Pee See Bee for pcb, I was saying process
control block.

> 
> Greg
-- 
Rod Grimes                                                 rgrimes at freebsd.org