On Wed, 7 Dec 2005 17:40:33 +0000
Julian Gilbey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Also, "manpage" versus "man page": there seem to be more pages using
> "manpage" than "man page", and I personally prefer "manpage" (as it is
> an abbreviation for "manual page", not a page for men), so I'm not
> going to change these. Either "manual page" or "man. page" might be
> better, but the "word" manpage is familiar enough in the UN*X world to
> be acceptable on a manpage.
It's not in the current dictionaries, perhaps it should be added via a
'wishlist' bug.
And some idle thoughts about compound words, (caveat emptor):
On unix-ese, slang, and alternate spellings peculiar to computer
subcultures, especially new compound words. I see a lot of these, and
suspect there can be too much. Reading some man pages gives the feeling
that we're going back in time to ancient Rome where they'd write
everything that way, (or so I recall reading about somewhere):
"QuosquetandemabutereoCatilinepatentianostra", or to Orwell's 1984
"newspeak", or if not time, to some place with a language like German
where ad hoc compound words are orthodox. Lately in text
passages of man pages I've noticed 'filesystem', 'filename',
'username', 'manpage', 'timestamp', 'backtrace', 'readonly',
sourcecode', etc.
Meanwhile, some numbers from my system suggest "manpage" is more common:
# about how many man pages here?
%find /usr/share/man/ -type f -name "*.gz" | wc -l
6273
# how many usages of 'manpage' and "man page"?
% find /usr/share/man/ -type f -name "*.gz" -exec zcat '{}' \+ | grep
-ic manpage
1276
% find /usr/share/man/ -type f -name "*.gz" -exec zcat '{}' \+ | grep
-ic "man page"
1248
But is what's common king? Especially what's common among
specialists. If it matters 'man man' uses "man page".
I'd say the spaces are formal, while sans spaces is slang adopted from
command line syntax. If that's correct, the general question would be
whether man pages should be formal documents, or texts with relatively
loose standards... or both. And which format would be more widely
useful, what's cozy to a subculture may alienate a wider public.
A consolation: 'manpage', having no homonyms is simpler to mechanically
translate than 'man page'.
Math historians seem to agree that the invention of '0' (zero) and
positional notation, besides being an improvement over Greek and Roman
numeral systems, was a great thing. It seems hard to imagine that it
once had opponents.
Maybe somebody knows where or when the text space was first invented,
if it can be said to have been; compared to zero, it's not as great,
but it's surely a very good thing, and comparable in being another bit
of nothing that's quite useful. Perhaps one reason the English
language is so widespread is that it has fewer compounds than, say
German.
(Nothing against German, it's just I'm no linguist and wouldn't
know what the Top 10 compound loving languages might be, only that
German has some. On second thought, some Native American languages
have lengthy compounds, and both zoological and chemical nomenclature
can get stringy...)
On the other hand, English is mostly compounds and I'd hate to
be stuck with just one syllable words, and have no beef with slang
or colorful dialects. Butwheretodrawthelineorputthespace!
We should address as wide an audience as possible, rather than to give
preference to specialists who can understand concessions to the
general public so much more easily than the public can understand
concessions to the specialist.
(Still, it's probably futile to resist 'manpage'.)
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