Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!bionet!ames!think!barmar
From: barmar@think.COM (Barry Margolin)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Looking for Computer Folklore
Message-ID: <36577@think.UUCP>
Date: 21 Feb 89 23:44:11 GMT
References: <7143@pyr.gatech.EDU> <532@geovision.UUCP> <4575@tekgvs.GVS.TEK.COM> <20373@coherent.com> <1051@vsi.COM> <112@cat.Fulcrum.BT.CO.UK>
Sender: news@think.UUCP
Reply-To: barmar@kulla.think.com (Barry Margolin)
Organization: Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 39

In article <112@cat.Fulcrum.BT.CO.UK> igb@fulcrum.bt.co.uk (Ian G Batten) writes:
>Multics Emacs was written and initially maintained by Bernie Greenberg.
>Most of the source and comments were in Latin (dog and otherwise) and
>various other foreign, obsolete and sometimes near-Lovecraftian tounges.
>Not easy hacking.  Then Barry Margolin took over.  The comments in the
>history file was along the lines of:
>
>;;; The glorious dawn on a new rosy age!  Comments in English!

Actually, Richard Soley was there for a little while between Bernie
and me, and that one was his.

In actual fact, most of the comments in Emacs (what few there were --
Bernie is brilliant, but not a very clear coder) were in English.  The
Latin comments were mostly in one module (e_redisplay_.lisp), and
mostly confined to the change journal at the beginning.  But you were
right about some of the weird function names.

A few years before Bernie wrote Multics Emacs, he reimplemented the
Multics file system.  One of the things he implemented as part of it
was a salvager (like Unix fsck).  One of the things it would do is
walk up and down the hierarchies, and if it reached the top it would
check that it was at the same file as it started, and report an error
if not.  Apparently he thought this was not likely to happen, so he
put the message in Latin.  I don't remember the original, but it
translated to something like "Unto the root is born a brother."
Needless to say, a few years after Bernie left the company, a site
actually got this error, and was very confused (it comes out on the
operator's console, and operators are not likely to be well versed in
Church Latin).  We reworded the error message in the next release.

Finally, the subroutine in the salvager that reconnects orphan files
is called reverse_deciduate.

Barry Margolin
Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar@think.com
{uunet,harvard}!think!barmar