newbie question

Cy Schubert Cy.Schubert at cschubert.com
Thu May 23 14:36:58 UTC 2019


On May 22, 2019 10:05:34 PM PDT, "Rodney W. Grimes" <freebsd-rwg at gndrsh.dnsmgr.net> 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.
>
>> 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

Yeah, there was no IEBCPY. Only IEBCOPY, though many sites wrote their own due to ancient versions of the program were incapable of reblocking datasets and borking the DSCB (akin to an inode) in the process.




-- 
Pardon the typos and autocorrect, small keyboard in use.
Cheers,
Cy Schubert <Cy.Schubert at cschubert.com>
FreeBSD UNIX: <cy at FreeBSD.org> Web: http://www.FreeBSD.org

	The need of the many outweighs the greed of the few.


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