From: Denis Bredelet ([email protected])
Date: Tue Sep 26 2000 - 01:28:02 CEST
> My serious vote is for 'queue', but would prefer 'vlad'. Does anybody like
> 'vlad'? It's not obvious what it means, but it is memorable**. Some unix
> commands have perfectly descriptive names, but they're so indistinct I forget
> what they do. For example, I often confuse 'which', 'type', and 'file'.
>
> (**in American English anyhow. Looking up the title 'count', it seems that it
> is 'comes' in Latin, 'conde' in Spanish and Portuguese, 'graf' in German and
> Russian, 'hrabia' in Polish, and 'earl' in English. Maybe none of these have
> the additional meaning of the verb 'to enumerate', as 'count' does in English.)
>
LOL
count as enumerate is a distinct word in most languages :-P
conta in portuguese, compte in french (as opposed to Comte)
However it doesn't matter since the dominant idiom in computer science is American
english...
I just checked my french/english dictionary : Earl would do in european english,
wouldn't it?
BTW, what does vlad stand for? Is that some sort of "count" (or rather Earl)?
(I suspect that Count Dracula might really be Vladimir Dracula, but am not sure of
it --that will do for my culture ;-))
>
> All this reminds me of two more arguments in its favor:
>
> 1) Computer programming has a tradition of bad English puns, sort of as comic
> relief from other vague or pretentious naming conventions. But maybe there are
> already too many humorous names.
>
> 2) A pun on 'count' is a pun on aristocracy, which is in keeping with the
> humanist ideals of something like muLinux.
>
> BTW, International readers may or may not be aware that defanged versions of
> Dracula are ubiquitous in American pop-culture. For example, "Count Chocula",
> is the name of a pre-sweetened breakfast cereal whose mascot seems to prefer
> this sugary cereal to human blood. "The Count", a Jim Henson muppet who teaches
> basic counting drills to children on PBS' Sesame Street. "Count Duckula"... a
> short lived comic/cartoon that I know little about except that it looked like a
> cross between Donald Duck and a vampire. It would be possible to list many
> others, but thankfully time does not permit...
>
> Per contra, it might be aggravating to anybody named Vladimir.
>
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