[TUHS] Of flags and keyletters

[TUHS] Of flags and keyletters

[Douglas McIlroy]

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> why did AT&T refer to "flags" as "keyletters" in its SysV documentation?

Bureaucracies beget bureaucratese--polysyllabic obfuscation, witness
APPLICATION USAGE in place of BUGS.

One might argue that replacing "flag" by "option", thus doubling the number
of syllables, was a small step in that direction. In fact it was a
deliberate attempt to discard jargon in favor of normal English usage.

Doug

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[TUHS] Re: Of flags and keyletters

[Steve Nickolas]

On Fri, 1 Mar 2024, Douglas McIlroy wrote:

> One might argue that replacing "flag" by "option", thus doubling the number
> of syllables, was a small step in that direction. In fact it was a
> deliberate attempt to discard jargon in favor of normal English usage.

I prolly got the term "switch" from IBM/Microsoft, but that's the term I'm 
used to (and my own implementations of Unix utilities do use the term in 
their error messages).

-uso.

[TUHS] Re: Of flags and keyletters

[Bakul Shah via TUHS]

> On Mar 1, 2024, at 7:49 AM, Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> wrote:
> 
> > why did AT&T refer to "flags" as "keyletters" in its SysV documentation?
> 
> Bureaucracies beget bureaucratese--polysyllabic obfuscation, witness APPLICATION USAGE in place of BUGS.
> 
> One might argue that replacing "flag" by "option", thus doubling the number of syllables, was a small step in that direction. In fact it was a deliberate attempt to discard jargon in favor of normal English usage.

Use of "flag" for this purpose seems strange. "option" makes more sense.

[TUHS] Re: Of flags and keyletters

[Paul Winalski]

On 3/1/24, Steve Nickolas <usotsuki@buric.co> wrote:
> On Fri, 1 Mar 2024, Douglas McIlroy wrote:
>
>> One might argue that replacing "flag" by "option", thus doubling the
>> number
>> of syllables, was a small step in that direction. In fact it was a
>> deliberate attempt to discard jargon in favor of normal English usage.

IBM did a similar thing in their use of the term "main storage" for
what the whole rest of the industry calls "main memory".  They felt
that "memory" was too anthropomorphic.

> I prolly got the term "switch" from IBM/Microsoft, but that's the term I'm
> used to (and my own implementations of Unix utilities do use the term in
> their error messages).

The term "switch" for command line options is pretty much
universal--it's not IBM specific and predates the existence of
Microsoft by about two decades.

Back in the 1950s when you ran one program at a time on a computer,
there were toggle switches on the control panel that could be read by
the running program.  Combinations of these were in common use to
select various options of program behavior.  When operating systems
came along, you couldn't pass the info to running programs by having
the operator physically flip a switch on the console.  I remember that
IBM DOS/360 had a Job Control Language (JCL) statement "// UPSI" (UPSI
= User Program Switch Indicators) that allowed one to set the
"switches" as seen by the running user program.

When interactive and timesharing systems came along, they supported
command line options in place of the original switches.  In DEC's
operating systems for PDP-8 -10, and -11, these were originally a
slash character followed by a single letter or digit.  The slash was
used because it resembles a toggle switch.  Unix was using the slash
as a directory separator in pathnames and so they used the hyphen to
introduce command options instead.  Microsoft's command line interface
for the PC was modeled after DEC's RT-11 operating system and used
slash for command options.  When they implemented Unix-style directory
paths, they had to use backslash as the separator because forward
slash was already in use.

-Paul W.

[TUHS] Re: Of flags and keyletters

[silas poulson via TUHS]

> On 1 Mar 2024, at 16:56, Bakul Shah via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
> Use of "flag" for this purpose seems strange. "option" makes more sense

I always took it to be a semi descriptive joke, like “mouse”, with the 
sort of flag you wave. At least that’s what I assumed the origin was.

Silas

[TUHS] Re: Of flags and keyletters

[Paul Winalski]

On 3/1/24, Bakul Shah via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
>
> Use of "flag" for this purpose seems strange. "option" makes more sense.

I think the term "flag" for command line options comes from the way
that those options are typically implemented in code.  The command
line options are usually used to set a boolean variable in the program
that can be tested to see if the option was present.

"Flag" as a synonym for a boolean variable in turn comes from the
ordinary English verb "to flag", meaning "to mark or identify"

-Paul W.

[TUHS] Re: Of flags and keyletters

[Warner Losh]

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On Sat, Mar 2, 2024, 11:24 AM Paul Winalski <paul.winalski@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 3/1/24, Bakul Shah via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
> >
> > Use of "flag" for this purpose seems strange. "option" makes more sense.
>
> I think the term "flag" for command line options comes from the way
> that those options are typically implemented in code.  The command
> line options are usually used to set a boolean variable in the program
> that can be tested to see if the option was present.
>
> "Flag" as a synonym for a boolean variable in turn comes from the
> ordinary English verb "to flag", meaning "to mark or identify"
>

And the variables set were named Xflag.

Warner

>

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[TUHS] Re: Of flags and keyletters

[Lars Brinkhoff]

silas poulson wrote:
> Bakul Shah wrote:
>> Use of "flag" for this purpose seems strange. "option" makes more sense
> I always took it to be a semi descriptive joke, like “mouse”, with the 
> sort of flag you wave.

At this point we should recall the quote "cat came back from Berkeley
waving flags", attributed to Rob Pike.

[TUHS] Of flags and keyletters

[Dave Horsfall]

Just recollecting old memories: why did AT&T refer to "flags" as 
"keyletters" in its SysV documentation?  Some sort of denial of 
Ed5/6/7/BSD's very existence?

The one good they did was the TTY driver...

-- Dave, who used to work for a SysVile shop