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Reworking the semaphore interface

Posted Dec 15, 2005 12:02 UTC (Thu) by nurhussein (guest, #16226)
Parent article: Reworking the semaphore interface

We could use the original dutch P and V for semaphore naming :)

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Posted Dec 18, 2005 23:42 UTC (Sun) by farnz (guest, #17727) [Link]

For those of us who haven't researched semaphores thoroughly, and who are unfortunately monolingual, would you mind explaining the original Dutch P and V?

I'm assuming that they're both abbreviations for Dutch words, but as I speak English adequately, and can just about speak enough French to be understood (usually discovering in the process that the French speak better English than I do), I'd appreciate an explanation.

Dutch origins

Posted Dec 19, 2005 4:29 UTC (Mon) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

V is for 'verhoog', or 'increment', while P is for the neologism 'Prolag' formed from 'Probeer te verlagen', 'try to decrement'.

See http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD00xx/EWD51.html (Link found on Wikipedia)