4 ms·
The -P convention: turning a word into a question by appending the syllable "P"; from the LISP convention of appending the letter "P" to denote a predicate (a B
by reaperducer 3y ago
The -P convention: turning a word into a question by appending the syllable "P"; from the LISP convention of appending the letter "P" to denote a predicate (a Boolean-values function). The question should expect a yes/no answer, though it needn't. (See T and NIL.) At dinnertime: "Foodp?"
I'm old enough to have been active in this era, and to have sent messages on teletypes using the "P" suffix. But for us, it had nothing to do with LISP. Our machines weren't that cool.
In fact, they were so lame that many of the printing terminals lacked a question mark character. The P was used as a substitute for a ? because it was the closest visual substitution. And naturally, most of our messages were one or two words for economy. "FOODP" would print correctly on machines that couldn't print "FOOD?" Not everyone had a fancy glass terminal, so you had to assume the worst case scenario, and use "P" in case someone was on paper.
On a related note, to make it easier to count spaces in indented code, we would use a "b" character with a slash through it. So the teletype was print b, then back up a space by sending ^H, and then put a / through it.
It looked terrible, but got the job done. It used up a lot of ink, but the bosses were watching paper use, not ink.
- JdeBP 3y agoThis is the problem with the Hacker's Dictionary. Some of the stuff in it turned out to be just plain not what the people involved were actually doing.
- _a_a_a_ 3y agoWirth silver(?) Pascal book used 'b' overstruck with a backslash when spaces needed to be shown explicitly. I wonder if there's a unicode for that.
- kens 3y agoThere is U+2422 Blank Symbol (␢).
- gumby 3y ago"Splitp soup?" "T" We used to even use this in speech sometimes, especially when funny (say, agreeing to share Hot and Sour soup at Mary's, for which the conversation above would work well). Note the amusing pointlessness of p in this case since when speaking you'd pronounce a question anyway.
- antigonemerlin 3y agoReminds me of "ye", pronounced and meaning "the", in English, because medieval printers imported from Germany didn't have that letter "Þ' and 'Y' was the closest substitute.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoIt's worth noting that "ye" also existed as the second person plural pronoun while "þe" simultaneously existed as a second person singular. These are now merged in most English dialects. Getting the unrelated definite article "þe" mixed up in this and substituting a "y" was more than just a matter of misguided font substitution because some forms of the handwritten thorn look very similar to a "y". Two words pronounced "the", one of which is easily conflated with another spelled and pronounced "ye" leads to the inevitable result.