Whither Tango?

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Justin Johansson" <no at spam.com> wrote in message 
news:hlov1c$12sr$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> "Justin Johansson" <no at spam.com> wrote in message 
>> news:hlop1u$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?
>
>

Heh :) No, but one time I did have a college professor refer to my writing 
style as "constipated". Can't say I disagreed ;)