From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: dave@horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2014 03:25:41 +1100 (EST) Subject: [TUHS] speaking of early C compilers In-Reply-To: <20141027154810.EE17018C0A4@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20141027154810.EE17018C0A4@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: On Mon, 27 Oct 2014, Noel Chiappa wrote: > > What, as opposed to spelling creat() with an "e"? > > Actually, that one never bothered me at all! It still annoys me, and it lives on in O_CREAT. Then again, I once got annoyed with TBL's use of "center" [sic], and promptly implemented "centre" as well. > I tended to be more annoyed by _extra_ characters; e.g. the fact that > 'change directory' was (in standard V6) "chdir" (as opposed to just > plain "cd") I found far more irritating! Why make that one _five_ > characters, when most common commands are two?! (cc, ld, mv, rm, cp, > etc, etc, etc...) Especially when the syscall itself is chdir(). Perhaps "cd" was used for something else at the time? -- Dave Horsfall (VK2KFU) "Bliss is a MacBook with a FreeBSD server." http://www.horsfall.org/spam.html (and check the home page whilst you're there)