Etymology of `visiting' files

Etymology of `visiting' files

[Udyant Wig]

What motivated the choice of the verb `visiting'?

From reading some of the relevant section in the Emacs and Elisp
manuals, I understand the process the verb names.  However, I wanted to
find some reasoning or discussion about the choice of verb; my own
expectation would have been something like `edit' or `load', but that
would be looking through the lens provided by recent editing systems.

--
Udyant Wig

Re: Etymology of `visiting' files

[Pascal J. Bourguignon]

Udyant Wig <udyant@rudiments.goosenet.in> writes:

> What motivated the choice of the verb `visiting'?
>
> From reading some of the relevant section in the Emacs and Elisp
> manuals, I understand the process the verb names.  However, I wanted to
> find some reasoning or discussion about the choice of verb; my own
> expectation would have been something like `edit' or `load', but that
> would be looking through the lens provided by recent editing systems.

When you visit a friend's home, you enter it, you can look around, and
you may touch and change something (move a vase from the table to the
console) or not, and then leave the house.

Same with files.

visit = (or edit load)

edit implies some mutation.
load implies no mutation.

When you visit, you can do either.

-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                 http://www.informatimago.com/
“The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a
dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to
keep the man from touching the equipment.” -- Carl Bass CEO Autodesk

Re: Etymology of `visiting' files

[Yuri Khan]

On Mon, Aug 8, 2016 at 5:53 PM, Pascal J. Bourguignon
<pjb@informatimago.com> wrote:

>> What motivated the choice of the verb `visiting'?
>> my own expectation would have been something like `edit' or `load'

The word “edit” implies a one-time change.

The word “load” implies creating an in-memory copy of the whole file.

> When you visit a friend's home, you enter it, you can look around, and
> you may touch and change something (move a vase from the table to the
> console) or not, and then leave the house.

When you visit a friend’s home, you enter a small part of it, and you
may touch and change something in your immediate vicinity, or you can
explore different parts of the house.

The word “visit” might, at some time in the past, have meant getting
in position to perform modifications *without loading* the whole file
into memory. This could be an important factor when files were big and
memory was small. The changes could then be accumulated in memory as a
diff, small enough to fit in memory, to be applied on file save.

I do not know if this kind of memory use optimization has ever existed
in Emacs. But it might have, or it might have been considered a
future-in-the-past idea good enough to affect the terminology.

Of course, nowadays we have 64-bit address space and more virtual
memory than is ever necessary to edit any reasonably sized file (with
the notable exception of /dev/sda), so we can afford “loading” files.

Re: Etymology of `visiting' files

[Narendra Joshi]

I think it's a buffer visiting the file. The buffer is the guest. Thanks
for this perspective. :-)

Narendra Joshi
On 8 Aug 2016 16:28, "Pascal J. Bourguignon" <pjb@informatimago.com> wrote:

> Udyant Wig <udyant@rudiments.goosenet.in> writes:
>
> > What motivated the choice of the verb `visiting'?
> >
> > From reading some of the relevant section in the Emacs and Elisp
> > manuals, I understand the process the verb names.  However, I wanted to
> > find some reasoning or discussion about the choice of verb; my own
> > expectation would have been something like `edit' or `load', but that
> > would be looking through the lens provided by recent editing systems.
>
> When you visit a friend's home, you enter it, you can look around, and
> you may touch and change something (move a vase from the table to the
> console) or not, and then leave the house.
>
> Same with files.
>
> visit = (or edit load)
>
> edit implies some mutation.
> load implies no mutation.
>
> When you visit, you can do either.
>
> --
> __Pascal Bourguignon__                 http://www.informatimago.com/
> “The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a
> dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to
> keep the man from touching the equipment.” -- Carl Bass CEO Autodesk
>

Re: Etymology of `visiting' files

[Florian v. Savigny]

  > When you visit a friend's home, you enter it, you can look around, and
  > you may touch and change something (move a vase from the table to the
  > console) or not, and then leave the house.
  > 
  > Same with files.


Wonderful and convincing (or should I simply say "perfect"?)
explanation, Pascal! I really like that. But now my sense of sense has
been whetted:

Why are all the functions for visiting files called "find-file-..."
rather than "visit-file-..."??? (Surely they do nothing in the way of
finding out where a file is?)

Can we please rectify this for future generations? ;-)

Best regards,

Florian

-- 

Florian von Savigny
Melanchthonstr. 41
33615 Bielefeld

Re: Etymology of `visiting' files

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Mon, 08 Aug 2016 15:24:31 +0530 Udyant Wig <udyant@rudiments.goosenet.in> wrote: 

UW> What motivated the choice of the verb `visiting'?
UW> From reading some of the relevant section in the Emacs and Elisp
UW> manuals, I understand the process the verb names.  However, I wanted to
UW> find some reasoning or discussion about the choice of verb; my own
UW> expectation would have been something like `edit' or `load', but that
UW> would be looking through the lens provided by recent editing systems.

The term "visiting" does not show up in a 1978 guide to Emacs (but maybe
it was already in use):
https://web.archive.org/web/20110723033542/http://www.burlingtontelecom.net/~ashawley/gnu/emacs/doc/emacs-1978.html#Basic-File_002dHandling-Commands

It shows up in 1981, in the RMS paper on Emacs:
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html

Either way, I think it predates modern CUA standards, which emerged in
the late 80's, and which AFAIK set down the File menu (with Quit and
Open items) consistently.

HTH
Ted

Re: Etymology of `visiting' files

[Robert Thorpe]

Udyant Wig <udyant@rudiments.goosenet.in> writes:

> What motivated the choice of the verb `visiting'?
>
> From reading some of the relevant section in the Emacs and Elisp
> manuals, I understand the process the verb names.  However, I wanted to
> find some reasoning or discussion about the choice of verb; my own
> expectation would have been something like `edit' or `load', but that
> would be looking through the lens provided by recent editing systems.

I expect it's mnemonic.  On early versions of Emacs before GNU Emacs
using multiple buffers was considered advanced.  Emacs opened in a
"Main" buffer.  The keybinding C-x C-v ("visit-file") visited a file in
that buffer.  The keybinding C-x C-f ("find-file") visited a file in a
new buffer.

See pages 71 & 83 of this document from 1981.

http://pdp-10.trailing-edge.com/mit_emacs_170_teco_1220/01/info/emacs.guide.html
BR,
Robert Thorpe

Re: Etymology of `visiting' files

[Udyant Wig]

"Pascal J. Bourguignon" <pjb@informatimago.com> writes:
> When you visit a friend's home, you enter it, you can look around, and
> you may touch and change something (move a vase from the table to the
> console) or not, and then leave the house.
>
> Same with files.
>
> visit = (or edit load)
>
> edit implies some mutation.
> load implies no mutation.
>
> When you visit, you can do either.

That is a nice and reasonable rationale.  Thanks.

-- 
Udyant Wig

Re: Etymology of `visiting' files

[Udyant Wig]

Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:
> The term "visiting" does not show up in a 1978 guide to Emacs (but
> maybe it was already in use):
> https://web.archive.org/web/20110723033542/http://www.burlingtontelecom.net/~ashawley/gnu/emacs/doc/emacs-1978.html#Basic-File_002dHandling-Commands

Thanks for the link.  I was unaware of this one.

> It shows up in 1981, in the RMS paper on Emacs:
> http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html

I had checked this paper and also the Emacs manual for TWENEX users
(AIM-555).  Both mention `visiting' but include no rationale for the
choice.  Perhaps the technical meaning (of `visiting') was sufficiently
similar to regular English usage that it did not seem to need
explanation.

> Either way, I think it predates modern CUA standards, which emerged in
> the late 80's, and which AFAIK set down the File menu (with Quit and
> Open items) consistently.

IIRC, CUA came (long) after various Emacsen were written and in use; it
was mostly an effort to standardize DOS applications.  The Wikipedia
article says as much and lists a number of IBM documents beginning 1987.

<URL:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access>

> HTH
> Ted

It did.

-- 
Udyant Wig

Re: Etymology of `visiting' files

[Udyant Wig]

Thanks for the link.  I mentioned elsethread that the TWENEX manual was
one of the documents I had consulted to find an answer to this, but
found no explanation for the choice of verb.

-- 
Udyant Wig

Re: Etymology of `visiting' files

[Barry Margolin]

In article <87lh06bizj.fsf@rudiments.goosenet.in>,
 Udyant Wig <udyant.wig@gmail.com> wrote:

> Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:
> > The term "visiting" does not show up in a 1978 guide to Emacs (but
> > maybe it was already in use):
> > https://web.archive.org/web/20110723033542/http://www.burlingtontelecom.net/
> > ~ashawley/gnu/emacs/doc/emacs-1978.html#Basic-File_002dHandling-Commands
> 
> Thanks for the link.  I was unaware of this one.
> 
> > It shows up in 1981, in the RMS paper on Emacs:
> > http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html
> 
> I had checked this paper and also the Emacs manual for TWENEX users
> (AIM-555).  Both mention `visiting' but include no rationale for the
> choice.  Perhaps the technical meaning (of `visiting') was sufficiently
> similar to regular English usage that it did not seem to need
> explanation.

I think it may also be a bit of a retronym. Emacs has two commands for 
opening files: C-x C-f and C-x C-v. They needed mnemonics that 
distinguished them, so the first is "Find" and the second is "Visit".

GNU Emacs has abandoned the mnemonic name of C-x C-v.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***

Re: Etymology of `visiting' files, and for that matter, of `finding' them

[Florian v. Savigny]

  > I think it may also be a bit of a retronym. Emacs has two commands for 
  > opening files: C-x C-f and C-x C-v. They needed mnemonics that 
  > distinguished them, so the first is "Find" and the second is "Visit".

  > GNU Emacs has abandoned the mnemonic name of C-x C-v.

This is really interesting (along with the information on the "first"
buffer that originally opened when you started Emacs), and it has
created some unintuitiveness:

C-x C-f find-file
C-x C-v find-alternate-file

I remember I changed these key bindings long ago, because I did find
them unmemnonic, to:

C-x C-f find-file
C-x C-v view-file
C-x C-a find-alternate-file	(I think this one had no default binding.)

It is also interesting that Dired uses the following single-key
bindings:

e 	dired-find-file		   (obviously motivated by the term "editing")
;;      but also:
f 	dired-find-file		   (in reverence to function name and tradition)
a	dired-find-alternate-file
v 	dired-view-file


I realise now that "visit" unfortunately collides with "view", but I
still think that the nice "visiting" metaphor deserves more
recognition.

Of course, "finding" a file is now a term which is sort of hardwired
into my brain, but in decades of amateur hacking, I have become
convinced that not only the readability of code is very important, but
that *even more so*, it matters how painless, intuitive and memnonic
the user interface is (which is, surprisingly, even true when I have
programmed that interface /myself/), and that it is harmful to make
things unnecessarily unintuitive there. (Which may, in Emacs' case,
arguably contribute to making its use look like an esoteric endeavor
that is best left to the initiated, because it requires you to give
some words different meanings in your head than they normally have.)

The term "finding" a file would normally be used to refer to finding a
file, i.e. searching for and (hopefully) finding it, in line with the
*nix "find" command. Any function which expects the path of a file as
an argument hardly has any finding left to do.

As an interesting practical example of this confusion, consider the
find-dired and find-lisp libraries, in which "find" means "find". I
have only just discovered them, after ~ 20 yrs of using Emacs on a
several times daily basis, and even then only because this thread
inspired me to do so. I often forget where certain files are, but I
never looked for (or, at least, found) Emacs functions that could have
helped me to actually find them.

I am now seriously wondering whether the special Emacs meaning of
"finding" a file kept me from doing so. It does look like it, because
normally, I trust that there is an Emacs function for everything, and
look for it. But functions starting with "search-" consistently
referred to searching buffers (or files) for _strings_, and "find-"
was also ... well, already spoken for.

In my last post, my question if we could "rectify" this was at least
half a joke, but I now think there may be a case for making Emacs
terminology a bit more in line with normal language here. (Which is
not always, or necessarily, the same as (rigidly) "consistent", of
course, because normal language itself is definitely not consistent.)

Any thoughts on this?



-- 

Florian von Savigny
Melanchthonstr. 41
33615 Bielefeld