4 ms·

In addition to the military-programming history of "foo", there's also a military-programming history for the variable naming convention of "alfa", "bravo", "ch

by jph 2y ago

In addition to the military-programming history of "foo", there's also a military-programming history for the variable naming convention of "alfa", "bravo", "charlie", "delta", etc. The naming convention is known as the NATO phonetic alphabet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet

Cheer2171 2y ago
NATO phonetic alphabet is used in all areas where you have to say letters over voice. One character variable names for temp or iterator values are everywhere in programming. But I've never ever encountered one spelled out as a full transcriptions of the NATO phonetic alphabet like alfa, bravo, charlie. Exception is alpha for probability/statistics.
- g4zj 2y ago
  Some of them could potentially be a little confusing as well, such as "delta" in game development, "echo" in some networking contexts, or "uniform" in OpenGL shaders. I don't tend to use single-letter variable names outside of the standard `for(;;)` syntax, but if I did, I don't think I'd replace them in this way.
- mindcrime 2y ago
  > NATO phonetic alphabet is used in all areas where you have to say letters over voice. Not all. Military definitely favors NATO, but there are other phonetic alphabets in use. In particular, at least in the US, fire/ems personnel (and sometimes also law enforcement) use alternatives. The one that goes Adam, Boy (or Baker), Charlie, David, Edward, Frank, ... is still widely used. I've also known agencies to use a mix, like Adam, Baker, Charlie, Delta, ... (a law enforcement agency that I dispatched for back in the 1990's used this version). Source: was a firefighter and 911 dispatcher in a previous life and still spend a lot of time monitoring fire/ems channels locally just to stay connected to that world.
  - dfox 2y ago
    Law enforcement/EMS often have their own phonetic alphabets and it is not that uncommon to use two at once: one for call signs and second for the actual alphanumeric data (in theory, in practice it gets mixed up, but everybody still understands the meaning)
zabzonk 2y ago
> "alfa", "bravo", "Charlie", "delta" Bit offtopic: As well as general use, a lot of thesed are used to classify Soviet/Russien submarines from a NATO point of use. Even more off topic:This is quite interesting (to me at last) in that NATO has used prefix schemes for bombers, fighters etc. (for example Bear (bomber), Fishbed (fighter)) rather than their makers names. As far as I know, in WW2 the Germans always referred to RAF fighters by their RAF names.
wlindley 2y ago
In the 1940s, the Army used a phonetic alphabet starting Able, Baker, Charlie. My late father was on the first two postwar atomic bomb tests (the first after Trinity, and at Hiroshima, Nagasaki) which were Able and Baker. Able was an air burst over Bikini (thus the name of the swimsuit). Baker, the water burst, was the world's first atomic disaster; as a result of Baker, the third scheduled test Charlie was cancelled. My father died years later of colon cancer, perhaps not unrelated to contaminated air and water at the Eniwetok base afterwards. FUBAR indeed.
- somat 2y ago
  The change from able... to alpha... was a NATO thing. some European countries don't use the "a" in "able", so it was changed to the "a" in "alpha"
  - dfox 2y ago
    Also there is a way to pronounce all of the NATO alphabet words that is not exactly a normal english pronounciation in order to make the first letter obvious and to reduce the possibility of mistranscription (the most obvious example is “nineR”). Sadly this does not really work in Czech, as laypeople will very often interpret “keˈbɛk” as K. (So the takeaway there is to not use NATO phonetic alphabet when you are dictating the pickup code to the package pickup point clerk)

by jph 2y ago

Cheer2171 2y ago

NATO phonetic alphabet is used in all areas where you have to say letters over voice. One character variable names for temp or iterator values are everywhere in programming. But I've never ever encountered one spelled out as a full transcriptions of the NATO phonetic alphabet like alfa, bravo, charlie. Exception is alpha for probability/statistics.

g4zj 2y ago
Some of them could potentially be a little confusing as well, such as "delta" in game development, "echo" in some networking contexts, or "uniform" in OpenGL shaders. I don't tend to use single-letter variable names outside of the standard `for(;;)` syntax, but if I did, I don't think I'd replace them in this way.
mindcrime 2y ago
> NATO phonetic alphabet is used in all areas where you have to say letters over voice. Not all. Military definitely favors NATO, but there are other phonetic alphabets in use. In particular, at least in the US, fire/ems personnel (and sometimes also law enforcement) use alternatives. The one that goes Adam, Boy (or Baker), Charlie, David, Edward, Frank, ... is still widely used. I've also known agencies to use a mix, like Adam, Baker, Charlie, Delta, ... (a law enforcement agency that I dispatched for back in the 1990's used this version). Source: was a firefighter and 911 dispatcher in a previous life and still spend a lot of time monitoring fire/ems channels locally just to stay connected to that world.
- dfox 2y ago
  Law enforcement/EMS often have their own phonetic alphabets and it is not that uncommon to use two at once: one for call signs and second for the actual alphanumeric data (in theory, in practice it gets mixed up, but everybody still understands the meaning)

zabzonk 2y ago

> "alfa", "bravo", "Charlie", "delta" Bit offtopic: As well as general use, a lot of thesed are used to classify Soviet/Russien submarines from a NATO point of use. Even more off topic:This is quite interesting (to me at last) in that NATO has used prefix schemes for bombers, fighters etc. (for example Bear (bomber), Fishbed (fighter)) rather than their makers names. As far as I know, in WW2 the Germans always referred to RAF fighters by their RAF names.

wlindley 2y ago

In the 1940s, the Army used a phonetic alphabet starting Able, Baker, Charlie. My late father was on the first two postwar atomic bomb tests (the first after Trinity, and at Hiroshima, Nagasaki) which were Able and Baker. Able was an air burst over Bikini (thus the name of the swimsuit). Baker, the water burst, was the world's first atomic disaster; as a result of Baker, the third scheduled test Charlie was cancelled. My father died years later of colon cancer, perhaps not unrelated to contaminated air and water at the Eniwetok base afterwards. FUBAR indeed.

somat 2y ago
The change from able... to alpha... was a NATO thing. some European countries don't use the "a" in "able", so it was changed to the "a" in "alpha"
- dfox 2y ago
  Also there is a way to pronounce all of the NATO alphabet words that is not exactly a normal english pronounciation in order to make the first letter obvious and to reduce the possibility of mistranscription (the most obvious example is “nineR”). Sadly this does not really work in Czech, as laypeople will very often interpret “keˈbɛk” as K. (So the takeaway there is to not use NATO phonetic alphabet when you are dictating the pickup code to the package pickup point clerk)