Re: use of small kana on the increase?

Phil Yff wrote:
On Wed, 06 Dec 2006 08:42:37 -0800, Dan Rempel wrote:

Phil Yff wrote:
On Wed, 6 Dec 2006 02:44:24 +0000 (UTC), John J. Chew III wrote:

To add quibbles though:

USENET should be capitalised, especially if you are talking about the
good old days. 'tr' is a command, not a protocol, and it stands for
'translate', not 'transliterate'. ROT13 could loosely be called a
protocol, but not a UNIX one. USENET did not originate as a file
transfer protocol; it began by using the UUCP file transfer protocol.
ROT13 is not the simplest cipher to use with tr; it would save quite a
few keystrokes to use say "tr A-z N-zA-M". RFC 1036, the closest thing
there is to a USENET newsreader standard, makes no mention of ROT13.
Note the lack of capitalization quoting from:

http://usenet.ws/

Usenet is one of the oldest and most popular online networks. Usenet has
been around for nearly three decades, since 1979 to be precise.

In the good old days when we had only upper case Usenet was capitalized.
However, I find it easier to write it otherwise as is accepted practice
nowadays.

tr is a command. This is what my guide says:

tr tr from_set to_set
TRansliterate characters in from_set to the corresponding character in
to_set

I'm sure some guides have it as 'translate'. From a linguistic standpoint,
translate is more accurate than transliterate.
Since we're quibllingly picking nits, which system are you referring to?
I can't find my SysV manual, but the BSD and Solaris man pages both say
'tranlate'. Was it the same system where 'tr' defaulted to ROT13?

I never said 'tr' defaulted to ROT13. I said people started using the
ROT13 cipher using the 'tr' command. Actually I said the 'tr' utililty
because I had to write a utility that accomplished what people on UNIX
based systems were doing with the 'tr' command. (To be even more accurate,
it was a ROSCOE proc - I was in an IBM mainframe environment). However, I
concede that 'tr' is a UNIX command and not a utility since we're being so
fastidious.

Err, you said "There's a UNIX utility (tr) that does the cipher
automatically." And then when I said "'tr' doesn't do ROT-13 any more
automatically than it will do any other substitution" you said "I know
for a fact that it did," which I took to mean it defaulted to ROT13, or
at least had a handy switch; what else could you have meant? And I
didn't say anything about commands vs. utilities.

I, however, did not refer to 'tr' as a protocol as you allege. I said that
Usenet originated as a "UNIX to UNIX file transfer protocol". That is an
accurate statement.

Wasn't me alleging. And it seems to me that describing Usenet as a "UNIX
to UNIX file transfer protocol" is confusing a network and its
underlying protocols.

Usenet (short for 'user network') was a specialized
application of UUCP (short for UNIX to UNIX Copy). UUCP was a library of
programs and associated protocols for transferring files between UNIX
copmputers. I also said, "UNIX protocols were a heavy influence on
Usenet." That, too, was an accurate statement because Usenet relied
heavily on UUCP protocols. Too avoid further quibbles, I realize that
today hardly anyone uses UUCP and other protocols such as NNTP and IMAP are
now used instead. And, yes, NNTP and IMAP are protocols. The 'P' in both
acronyms stands for protocol.

Although I trust in your ability to search the web, since you wanted a
reference for "tr - transliterate", go to this URL:

Actually, all I wanted to know was what variant of unix had a tr that
defaulted to ROT13 and had man pages that said 'tr' stood for
'transliterate'. Anyway, this is getting stupid, and I bow out.

Dan

--
Look! Before our very eyes, the future is becoming the past.
.

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