charles@dragon.UUCP (10/28/87)
Since Comp.unix.wizards is currently a discussion of favorite variable names, I'll mention the "fruits convention" a friend and I came up with while teaching a bunch of novice users the rudiments of IBM jcl. The convention was that, anywhere we used the name of a fruit in an example, it mean you could use any (syntactically correct) name you wanted. For example, when we gave an example of how to define an input file, instead of saying //INPUT DD ... we'd use //APPLES DD ... Any other references to that particular input file in the rest of the jcl (or source code, etc.) would also refer to APPLES. This made it clear which names were significant and which could be "anything you choose". Saved us a lot of questions about "if I have two input files, what do I have to call the second one?". Of course, we ended up with a whole lot of files on the system called "apples", but that's how it goes...
redbob@mips.UUCP (Robert A. Knox) (10/29/87)
In article <585@dragon.UUCP> charles@dragon.UUCP (Charles Wolff, x3432) writes: >Since Comp.unix.wizards is currently a discussion of favorite variable >names, I'll mention the "fruits convention" a friend and I came up with >while teaching a bunch of novice users the rudiments of IBM jcl. The >convention was that, anywhere we used the name of a fruit in an example, >it mean you could use any (syntactically correct) name you wanted. > I used to do almost exactly the same thing. When helping new users at Purdue on the CDC systems, I used animal names instead of fruits. It really did seem to help them figure out that they were able to call a file anything they wanted. (Also, when it came to cleaning up a directory, I knew it was safe to blow away "horse", "fish", and "dog".) This worked fine until I got to UNIX. Unfortunately, one of the most commonly used commands on UNIX IS an animal name. ("But, Mr. Consultant, what does `cat cat` mean?") ^G^G RedBob -- Robert Knox DISCLAIMER: <generic disclaimer, I speak only for others, etc> UUCP: {decvax,ucbvax,ihnp4}!decwrl!mips!redbob DDD: 408-720-1700, x287 USPS: MIPS Computer Systems, 930 E. Arques, Sunnyvale, CA 94086