Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 1 Dec 2005 16:51:44 +0000 | From | Russell King <> | Subject | Re: [patch 00/43] ktimer reworked |
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On Thu, Dec 01, 2005 at 08:22:01AM -0800, Ray Lee wrote: > On 12/1/05, Roman Zippel <zippel@linux-m68k.org> wrote: > > The human language is a bit more complicated than this (at least English > > and related languages). Depending on the context a word can have different > > meanings, e.g. if you ask an athlete what "timeout" means, you'll get a > > different answer than you would get from an engineer. > > Actually, no you won't. The athlete will say "A timeout? Something out > of the ordinary happened, and coach wants me to go to the sidelines to > talk." Timeouts are unexpected and exceptional, whether you're an > athlete or a piece of code. On the other hand, they have a timer that > everyone *expects* to expire at the end of the quarter or game. > > Ray, who is both an athlete and a native English speaker, who thinks > the naming is the clearest of anything to come across this list in > ages.
rmk, also a native English speaker, agrees with Ray, Thomas and Ingo. As does dictionary.reference.com's definitions of timeout and timer:
timeout
A period of time after which an error condition is raised if some event has not occured. A common example is sending a message. If the receiver does not acknowledge the message within some preset timeout period, a transmission error is assumed to have occured.
timer
a timepiece that measures a time interval and signals its end
Hence, timers have the implication that they are _expected_ to expire. Timeouts have the implication that their expiry is an exceptional condition.
So can we stop rehashing this stupid discussion?
-- Russell King Linux kernel 2.6 ARM Linux - http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/ maintainer of: 2.6 Serial core - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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