[TUHS] Etymology of bc(1)

[Dave Horsfall]

On Fri, 12 Sep 2014, Tim Bradshaw wrote:

> Curiously, I understand that studying Italian (or romance languages in 
> general) turns out to be a fairly good way of learning about the Latin, 
> where by "Latin" they mean the language people actually *spoke*, as 
> opposed to the deformed version of it that some tiny minority of people 
> wrote.

And as we stray even further from our original brief (Monty Python quote, 
but OT stuff can be fun at times), English in turn is not Romance but 
Germanic, and has been described as not so much as borrowing words from 
other languages as chasing them down dark alleys and beating them 
senseless.

> In a thousand years, it will also turn out that the best way to learn 
> about Unix will be by reading the archives of some mailing list where 
> people discussed their memories of the early versions of it.

Reckon they might also wonder why Americans don't use English? :-)

In the meantime, the next time NASA launches a probe then perhaps it could 
carry a DVD of Warren's archives; there's both an LP and a CD out there, 
after all.

-- Dave, who would also spell creat(2) with an "e"