Whither Tango?

[Justin Johansson]

Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "Justin Johansson" <no at spam.com> wrote in message 
> news:hlop1u$o1m$1 at digitalmars.com...
>> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>> Right, that's what I meant. Use a word starting with "retro-" when 
>>> talking to a english-speaking person, and even if they're uneducated, 
>>> they'll most likely have a good idea what is meant by that prefix.
>> What about persons with English not as a first language?
>>
> 
> I do realize that different native languages can be an issue, but at some 
> point a library has to use *some* language, and the established standard for 
> phobos just happens to be english. If we start banning terms from use in a 
> language or a library on the basis of whether a non-native english speaker 
> is likely to know it, then I suspect (though I admit that I don't know for 
> certain) you'd have to eliminate most of the given language/library because 
> there's no guarantee non-native speakers would know any of it.
> 
> For instance, if there were a russian-langauge library, and I tried to use 
> it, I wouldn't understand any of the words except nyet and da (and I'm not 
> even sure of the correct spellings of those - in either roman or cyrillic). 
> And I would be well aware that I wouldn't be able to assume I knew what 
> something did without a little digging. Of course, I certainly sympathize 
> that this can be a pain for non-native-english-speaking programmers, and 
> that it's an issue native english speaking programmers like me will probably 
> never be able to truly understand, but until we get to some hypothetcal 
> point in the future where everyone speaks the same language, then, again, at 
> some point there really is no choice but to just assume at least some 
> particular language.
> 
> Besides, computer terminology is already, at best, just a bunch of vague 
> meaphors anyway. When I started programing, it took me all of about a minute 
> to learn that "string" had nothing to do with the stuff cloth is made of and 
> stitched together with. And "SCSI" doesn't mean a damn thing at all, even to 
> an english speaker, but I still learned it quickly enough. So even if I 
> wasn't familiar with "retro" as anything other than "old style", I'm sure I 
> still could have gotten used to it very quickly, especially considering that 
> in 99.99% of contexts it's going to be pretty damn clear that it's not being 
> used to refer to bell-bottoms, chome appliances, and flock-of-seagulls 
> haircuts.
> 

One famous mathematician, in writing to another famous mathematician,
once wrote "I apologize for the length of this letter, but I don't have
time to be brief".

So question is, are you the former famous mathematician?