On Thu, Dec 01, 2005 at 08:22:01AM -0800, Ray Lee wrote:
> On 12/1/05, Roman Zippel <[email protected]> wrote:
> > The human language is a bit more complicated than this (at least English
> > and related languages). Depending on the context a word can have different
> > meanings, e.g. if you ask an athlete what "timeout" means, you'll get a
> > different answer than you would get from an engineer.
>
> Actually, no you won't. The athlete will say "A timeout? Something out
> of the ordinary happened, and coach wants me to go to the sidelines to
> talk." Timeouts are unexpected and exceptional, whether you're an
> athlete or a piece of code. On the other hand, they have a timer that
> everyone *expects* to expire at the end of the quarter or game.
>
> Ray, who is both an athlete and a native English speaker, who thinks
> the naming is the clearest of anything to come across this list in
> ages.
rmk, also a native English speaker, agrees with Ray, Thomas and Ingo.
As does dictionary.reference.com's definitions of timeout and timer:
timeout
A period of time after which an error condition is raised if some event
has not occured. A common example is sending a message. If the receiver
does not acknowledge the message within some preset timeout period, a
transmission error is assumed to have occured.
timer
a timepiece that measures a time interval and signals its end
Hence, timers have the implication that they are _expected_ to expire.
Timeouts have the implication that their expiry is an exceptional
condition.
So can we stop rehashing this stupid discussion?
--
Russell King
Linux kernel 2.6 ARM Linux - http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/
maintainer of: 2.6 Serial core
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to [email protected]
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
[Index of Archives]
[Kernel Newbies]
[Netfilter]
[Bugtraq]
[Photo]
[Stuff]
[Gimp]
[Yosemite News]
[MIPS Linux]
[ARM Linux]
[Linux Security]
[Linux RAID]
[Video 4 Linux]
[Linux for the blind]
[Linux Resources]
