Re: alias hygiene

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@brasslantern.com>]

On Sat, Feb 17, 2018 at 7:42 AM, Ray Andrews <rayandrews@eastlink.ca> wrote:
>
> Ok, that at least is good to know.  Now I have to figure out from your
> example what a widget is, I've heard the term but so far I have no clue what
> sort of critter they might be.

A "widget" is just an arbitrary thing that you've built.  It's like
using the word "foo" as a placeholder for an abstract value.  As far
back as I remember, a "widget" was used in economics to refer to an
unspecified object, such as a consumer good or a machine part, that
was manufactured by a hypothetical factory or sold by a hypothetical
wholesaler or retailer, but you can probably find earlier meanings
with an etymology search.  When windowing UIs became a thing back in
the 80s it got retconned into a portmanteau of "window gadget" and
used to describe components of the desktop.  Zsh borrowed the term to
refer to the chunk of programming, whether C or shell function, that
implements a named and therefore bindable operation in the ZLE editor.