Re: Manual: clarify what POSIX stands for

[Poor Yorick]

On 2024-04-01 03:47, 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".))

Nonsense.  I'm a native English speaker, and I always look into what
acronyms mean.  GNU standards "GNU's not Unix", and that's off the top 
of my
head.  The recursion was a joke by the original author of the term.

> 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.)

Nonsense.

> Therefore, I propose to add the meaning of the abbreviature to the 
> manual.
>
>
> That's going to be tricky, since like most English names, it does not 
> *mean*
> anything. Rather, it has a referent, which is ISO/IEC 9945.

Nonsense.
> The name "POSIX" was adopted largely because it was more memorable and
> easier to pronounce than alternatives that were suggested at the time, 
> and
> forty year later that's the name it's universally known by. The history 
> is
> a bit unclear on this point, but it seems likely that POSIX was coined
> first, and then the retronym "Portable Operating System Interface" was
> coined to match it a few minutes later.
>
> Most English speakers find "explanations of names" to be distractions
> rather than helping, so if you REALLY want to add this, can it please 
> NOT
> be right next to the first use of the word "POSIX". For example as an
> end-note. (If this were MarkDown or HyperText, I'd say "put a link and
> nothing else", but unfortunately man pages are written in ROFF, so 
> links
> aren't easily accessible.)

Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense.
> («portable operating system interface X», or something like that).
>
>
> Close, but no; the «X» does not abbreviate anything; it's there because 
> in
> the 1980's it was customary for Unix-like operating systems to have
> block-capital names ending with «IX». Maybe *that* should go in the
> explanation.
>
> I suggest an explanation more along the lines of «POSIX is a suite of
> standards endorsed jointly by the International Standards Organisation 
> (
> ISO.org) and the International Electro-technical Commission (IEC.ch) as
> ISO/IEC 9945. The current revision is POSIX-1-2017, based on ISO/IEC
> 9945-2008 with technical corrigenda. Further information is available 
> at
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX».
>
> -Martin (Martin's Adroit Recursive Turing Implementing Noggin) (*3)

Just include the term that the acronym standards for near the first
occurrence of the term in the documentation.  Nothing could be simpler.

--
Yorick