Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!unido!ztivax!lbo
From: lbo@ztivax.UUCP (Dr Lothar Borrmann)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: foreign language requirements for PhDs
Keywords: Dijkstra, P, V, operators
Message-ID: <653@ztivax.UUCP>
Date: 17 Mar 89 17:01:20 GMT
References: <7287@spool.cs.wisc.edu> <2851@eos.UUCP> <401@rb-dc1.UUCP> <21572@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU> <1280@wpi.wpi.edu> <134@cs.columbia.edu> <210@wc8.idca.tds.philips.nl>
Reply-To: lbo@ztivax.UUCP (Dr Lothar Borrmann)
Organization: Siemens AG in Munich, W-Germany
Lines: 27

In article <210@wc8.idca.tds.philips.nl> lexw@idca.tds.PHILIPS.nl (Lex Wassenberg) writes:
>
>Apparantly, Dijkstra himself
>is the only one who can say anything about this topic with authority. But during
>the course, we discussed it several times (we were with 16 Dutch guys) and
>nobody could give any satisfying explanation for the P and V abbreviations, so
>we decided that that the story might be true.
>
I read Dijstra's papers some years ago and I remember that he himself
gives the explanation (probably in the paper about "The THE
Multiprocessing System"). I don't have the paper at hand, but I
remember the meaning (as the Dutch words are similar to German).
P is the abbreviation of the Dutch word for 'test'
V is the abbreviation of the Dutch word for 'increment'

Hope this helps.

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Lothar Borrmann                       Email:
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