jc@minya.UUCP (John Chambers) (08/29/87)
In article <1685@sol.ARPA>, ken@cs.rochester.edu (Ken Yap) writes: > Say, guys, why don't you have it out by mail and post a summary when > the wars are over? Half :-). > No, don't stop! I'm bringing this flaming session (oops, I mean serious technical discussion :-) to the attention of the folks over in sci.lang, and they might find it very interesting. Hey, sci.lang folks, we have here a real, live anecdotal illustration of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. There's a very confused discussion going on in comp.unix.wizards that is based on a peculiarity of the English language, and since the participants are clearly all native speakers of English, their concepts and attitudes are strongly constrained, making a solution impossible. The discussion is on the subject of symbolic links; in particular, the question is: After doing a "cd foo" where foo is a symbolic link to some other directory, what is the meaning of ".."? Is it the "true" parent of foo? Is it the directory you cd'd from? This is complete with quite forceful assertions that one or the other is The Right Interpretation. What has this to do with the SWH? Well, the crux of the discussion is the phrase 'the meaning of ".."'. The language-based problem is, of course, the English word "the", which is used to imply that there is a unique object that satisfies the criterion. For the original Unix file system, a directory had a unique parent, and ".." had a well-defined interpretation as "the parent directory" Once symbolic links were foisted upon an unsuspecting Unix world, this broke down. It is now possible for a directory to have multiple parents, and the phrase "the parent of" no longer has a (unique) referent. The participants in the discussion seem to have no idea that this is a problem; they continue to argue about "the" meaning of "..". I contend that if this discussion were taking place in, say, Latin or Russian (which lack definite articles), the discussion would have been short-lived. A phrase such as "parent of" would be obviously ambiguous, and discussion of the correct meaning would easily be seen as silly as discussion which of your biologic parents ("the mother" or "the father") is the correct interpretation of "the parent". This discussion is especially interesting from a linguistic viewpoint, because the native language of these people distinguishes "mother" from "father", and "the parent" is inherently ambiguous. However, the parties to the current discussion are in the sublanguage of Unix, so they speak a language in which "the parent" is (or at least used to be) unambiguous. Their prior competence in everyday English seems to have no effect on their analysis of the Unix problem; the language's use of the definite article strongly constrains their approaches to the "problem" and prevents a solution. I recommend this discussion to readers of sci.lang, and I request that the participants in comp.unix.wizards keep it up for a while longer. -- John Chambers <{adelie,ima,maynard}!minya!{jc,root}> (617/484-6393)
gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn ) (08/29/87)
In article <126@minya.UUCP> jc@minya.UUCP (John Chambers) writes: >The participants in the discussion seem to have no idea that this >is a problem; they continue to argue about "the" meaning of "..". I find your condescending sneering at people trying to work out a technical issue extremely inappropriate. The participants in the discussion (before you entered) certainly WERE aware of the only technical point you had to offer, and they were not arguing about ""the" meaning of ".."". The essential problem is that the interpretation of ".." by the kernel namei() code is necessarily deterministic -- that is what changes multiple theoretically possible "meanings" into a particular acual interpretation. The issue is, and has been, what would be the best choice among the (quite well understood) available alternatives for the kernel behavior. The dispute has been essentially over the value metric for "best". Perhaps it is YOU that have problems with the English language?