Date: Sat, 30 Aug 2003 17:25:21 +0200 From: Erik Trulsson <ertr1013@student.uu.se> To: Hendrik Hasenbein <hhasenbe@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de> Cc: Vitali Malicky <life@zone3000.net> Subject: Re: Newer names Message-ID: <20030830152521.GA54379@falcon.midgard.homeip.net> In-Reply-To: <3F50B100.1020601@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de> References: <1e2.f3352ba.2c81bfb8@aol.com> <005e01c36ef5$c9b17900$2401010a@zone3000.net> <3F50B100.1020601@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de>
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On Sat, Aug 30, 2003 at 04:13:20PM +0200, Hendrik Hasenbein wrote: > Vitali Malicky wrote: > >What about DRAGON? There is also such a term as DRAGON. Yes, I'm all > >serious. cron is a DRAGON, for example. DRAGON is a process which may run > >other processes periodically under a user specified. What about it? And > >many > >my colleagues, and me as well, refer to it also as PROCESS. > You've made me curious. Can you explain me the acronym DRAGON? Or did > you just make that up? 'Dragon' is not an acronym. It is just a name. 'Daemon' is not an acronym either despite what some people tell you. The expansion 'Disk And Execution MONitor' was made up after the term 'daemon' had come in use, and should not be used. 'Dragon' is essentially an older and not as widespread term for what is today known as a 'daemon' in the Unix world. For more information about the terms 'dragon' and 'daemon' you can see the the entries for those words in the Jargon File at http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon and you can also see http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Daemon.html for information on how and whay the word 'daemon' came into use in computing. As for 'process', dragons and daemons are examples of processes, but there are many processes that are neither a dragon nor a daemon, so 'daemon' and 'process' are not synonymous, and changing all uses of 'daemon' into 'process' would lose quite a bit of precision in the language and is therefore not a good idea. -- <Insert your favourite quote here.> Erik Trulsson ertr1013@student.uu.se
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