While I get that the term originated in the Unix/C world[1], does anyone know if it comes from a particular US dialect or something? e.g. West Coast/Boston?
What else?
Routine would be renamed Poutine.
One thing I'm surprised to have seen only once is use of ¬ as an escape character, because it's so reliably unused for anything at all. (I noticed in the code that this program, which needless to say was written at a UK company, had no way of escaping ¬ itself, presumably because nobody had ever needed that.)
£ also seems a bit underused, but it's fairly specifically the UK's currency symbol, so it's not obvious else you'd use it for.
(But I suspect only UK keyboards have these chars, so it's probably no bad thing.)
As to why UK keyboards include it? Probably IBM, ¬ was the negation/not symbol in Z, it wouldn't surprise me if Hursley Park petitioned the rest of the company to ensure it was on the UK PC layout.
(This Z: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_notation )
Maple not Mapel
Cable not Cabel
Centre look and sounds like “cent-ruh” rather than the rolled out sounding of err sound to make “center”. Then again, how you say it is a bit different, too.
(0) my_structured_query_language_connect()
(1) SHFILEOPSTRUCTW [0]
(2) InternalFrameInternalFrameTitlePaneInternalFrameTitlePaneMaximizeButtonPainter [1]
[1] https://www.pushing-pixels.org/2007/11/07/and-the-longest-jr...
This is impeded when languages have popular modules with names that are absolutely unintuitive, like the Python "requests" module. Requests what? Oh, HTTP? Then it should have been called http_requests. And the module that one uses, urllib3, is actually an HTTP library, not a generic URL library (URLs can be any web request, such as ftp, mailto, jdbc, etc).
Python has httplib since 2.7. Also urllib in 3.7 contains all of the URL parsing routines, too.
Naming is a hard problem, so frankly I would prefer if names did not try to mimic their corresponding protocols in the first place at all.
It gets even worse when you would like to support HTTP and async HTTP; then HTTP/2, HTTPS, HTTP server, etc... Which one of these libraries are supposed to be actually called "http"? What if there's two libraries with the same functionality?
urllib? Well, yeah - simply because someone wanted to provide a simple HTTP interface. By the way - urllib also provides FTP/local file access routines. So it does mean "a library to access URLs".
I do this, Often I can save typing by liberal use of 'clever' features but I avoid them because if I have to stop to reason them out the poor sod reading my code (Which is often me in 6mths) will as well.
It's one of the things I dislike the most about JS, there are 18 different ways to skin the cat, some of which set the house on fire opposite but only if it's a monday and the cat isn't undefined.
It's what happens when a language accretes instead of gets designed.
I miss Pascal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_...
[1] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:imONA_3...
https://ipfs.eternum.io/ipfs/Qmf8bKiaDquBaspP1krKVMGnorby38h...