Talk:caddr

RFV discussion: November–December 2018
Rfv-sense this one seems to be stretching the idea of what constitutes English. - TheDaveRoss  18:46, 23 November 2018 (UTC)
 * I don't think this is a matter for RFV - it is a genuine command in LISP, but I agree that it is not English. Perhaps RFD? Kiwima (talk) 20:06, 23 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Having overheard LISP programmers speaking, I can testify that they use the term as if it is an English noun (as in “now take the caddr”). So (I think) the question is if a sufficient number of such sentences have been durably recorded, like here: “Is the caddr of a tree a datum?” or here: “The car of a list is always the first element, the cadr is always the second element, and the caddr is always the third element.” This is similar to the use of the term in mathematical discourse.  --Lambiam 21:55, 23 November 2018 (UTC)
 * That is trivial to do, cited. One could, however, argue that this is like using a foreign word. Kiwima (talk) 23:15, 23 November 2018 (UTC)
 * What foreign language? As I've argued before, if a string (in this case, "caddr") exists as a word in writing, we should not let fussing about the language stop us from recording it.--Prosfilaes (talk) 03:23, 24 November 2018 (UTC)
 * The foreign language would be LISP. (e.g. When I got my PhD., programming languages served to meet the foreign language requirement.) Kiwima (talk) 04:29, 24 November 2018 (UTC)
 * But we don't treat LISP as a foreign language, which means as a word, caddr needs to recorded as the language it's used or we simply won't record it at all.--Prosfilaes (talk) 06:46, 24 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Would French (e.g.) LISP programmers use the same word caddr in running French text with equal ease? I would guess they would. It is more translingual than English, but really it is just LISP. Every programming language has various structures and reserved words which have specific definitions in those programming languages, the question I have is whether or not those are de facto English (which I think they are not), and if not, how do we handle them. - TheDaveRoss  13:25, 26 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Look at this pdf; I believe it's related to the first cite. It's not about LISP, and it explains it uses LISP based terminology because that terminology is so common. This is not just LISP.--Prosfilaes (talk) 03:49, 29 November 2018 (UTC)
 * I would not agree about that document, and even if a function from one programming language gets borrowed into another that does not imply that it is English. Due to the nature of the term I am not sure what conclusive evidence could exist to make me feel that it was actually an English term, especially if I am unconvinced by the type of text which you provided. I might just be wrong. - TheDaveRoss  13:55, 6 December 2018 (UTC)
 * A thousand years ago, when I was a programmer, we would use terms from COBOL in running English. Also the COBOL textbooks did the same. I reckon it's English (and any other language that we can find quotes for). SemperBlotto (talk) 13:29, 26 November 2018 (UTC)


 * You can e.g. find people talking about "DIMming an array" (dimensioning it, in various forms of BASIC where DIM is a keyword). Equinox ◑ 14:06, 6 December 2018 (UTC)

RFV-passed Kiwima (talk) 20:44, 6 December 2018 (UTC)