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- Subject: Re: disassembler
- From: Hisham <h@...>
- Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2013 18:21:09 -0300
On 14 October 2013 17:08, Tim Hill <[email protected]> wrote:
> Putting my nit-picking hat on .. Fortran (or FORTRAN) isn't an acronym, it's a portmanteau
No, it's not. It's a syllabic abbreviation of "Formula Translating System":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabic_abbreviation#Syllabic_abbreviation
A strange phenomenon happened in Wikipedia where users started calling
every combination of words a portmanteau and ended up popularizing
this specific term, which led to a snowball effect (more people aware
of this word, who started using it in even more places). The
"portmanteau" effect has been a minor annoyance of mine for years, and
it even ended up on xkcd: http://xkcd.com/739/
-- Hisham
