Re: On computerese

[Damian McGuckin]

On Sun, 15 Sep 2024, hohe72@posteo.de wrote:

> 'catenate' is missing in Oxford learners and Oxford Compact Dictionary
> as well. It's objected by my mail client also. Seems to be American
> English.

> 'concatenate' seems to be a more common technical term. I learned it in
> study. Oxford mentioned it to be technical.

One comes from the Latin 'catenat' and the other to 'con-catenat-'. So, 
even its usage in Latin is technically separate. Any Latin scholars here?

Somebody on the internet tried to assert that "concatenate" was a computer 
term. Note sure the Romans had any of those things although they were good
engineers and mathematicians".

I thought that "catentat-" means to "link in a chain" (as in by things 
like atoms or molecules that do it for themselves) and that "concatenat-" 
means to "link together in a chain" by some external party, i.e.

        atoms can do the chaining for themselves
but
        files need Doug or Holger or myself to do the chaining

When using the 6th Edition, I can only remember the word 'concatentate. I 
can never remember the use of the word "catenate" there but that is going 
back a long long way. Who created the "cat" command and did they have the
word "catenate" or "concatenate" in their heads?

It is a bit like the "imaginary" part of a complex number. The original 
use of the term by Colin Maclaurin in about 1729 and Webster's definition 
agree that in a complex number like 'x + i y', the"imaginary" part is the 
imaginary number, i.e. it included the imaginary unit number 'i' (or iota 
as Euler said). But more than 50% of modern texts and standards including 
the NIST's DMLF and ISO's LIA and C standard disagree. Scary.

My 2c.

I have to admit that 40+ years of using "concatenate" would take a lot of 
unlearning.

> 'use case' is a well defined technical term.
>
> 'use' is a general term. (Nothing at all.)

I am very much on Doug's side there. Isn't "use" being used here in its 
more general use? The term "use case" is computerese run amok, or gone 
rampant. I hate "use case" as it almost sounds like a tautology.

- Damian