4 ms·
I figure it's quite common for non native speaker, no ?
by lta 3y ago
I figure it's quite common for non native speaker, no ?
- anthomtb 3y agoI am a native English speaker and never heard the word "semaphore" until taking CS classes in college. I cannot think of a common use for the term, unlike flag (see them all the time), register (do that with cars and schools) or stack (lots of those in my kitchen).
- perilunar 3y ago> register (do that with cars and schools) I would think computer register comes from the noun, not the verb — think cash register, not to register a car.
- anthomtb 3y agoI agree, I was just trying to think of how the word "register" comes up in casual conversation. I cannot think of a way that "semaphore" would come up in non-nerd conversation at all.
- theandrewbailey 3y agoOr the covering of an air vent in a house.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y agoEven as a native speaker, I had been using the programming concept for a few years before I discovered the signaling doohickey.
- lkbm 3y agoI only knew about non-computer semaphores from the Swallows and Amazons books (which are from the 1930s and 1940s). If my mom hadn't read those books to me as a child, I don't know that I'd have come across the concept. "Token ring" is something I learned in networking, and the Wikipedia article doesn't mention railroads at all. I assume that's where the term comes from, but I only heard about railway signalling tokens decades later. (I think they may have appeared in the Thomas the Tank Engine stories on Shining Time Station, but I was quite young at the time.)
- yosito 3y agoSemaphore basically means "traffic light" in many languages.