On Tue, Aug 10, 2004 at 03:17:20PM -0700, Jeff wrote: > I saw an article in Wired magazine recently that shows the swear > words in the linux kernel alone. .... > If the locker-room talk worries the suits trying to make money off > Linux, Linus Torvalds, the father of the OS, doesn't give a > damn. "Profanity and bad taste can be fine," he wrote to developers > in a 1999 email. The time to worry, he said, is "when the > profanities start to occupy a noticeable amount of kernel space." I would hope that there is no prohibition to the removal of such language from the source tree. Not so much that I worry about it but it is distracting and /* Ugly, ugly */. Comments like /* F&%k, we are miserable poor guys... */ tell me nothing about what concerned the author... Much of Linux was written by talented young bold kids and such language is common and to be expected. Changes should be permitted, as long as the revision history preserves them ;-) In Mexico a couple years back a colleague used the English 'f' word. When I mentioned that much of the language in American movies is simply bad and then uttered the Spanish equivalent he blanched and I never heard the word again. This stuff will go away.... just not tomorrow. -- T o m M i t c h e l l
