Messages in this thread | | | From | Dave Airlie <> | Date | Sun, 5 Jul 2020 12:54:17 +1000 | Subject | Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [PATCH] CodingStyle: Inclusive Terminology |
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On Sun, 5 Jul 2020 at 10:10, Matthew Wilcox <willy6545@gmail.com> wrote: > > Erm, red-black trees don't have a derivation from gambling terminology either. The wikipedia article says: > > In a 1978 paper, "A Dichromatic Framework for Balanced Trees",[6] Leonidas J. Guibas and Robert Sedgewick derived the red-black tree from the symmetric binary B-tree.[7] The color "red" was chosen because it was the best-looking color produced by the color laser printer available to the authors while working at Xerox PARC.[8] Another response from Guibas states that it was because of the red and black pens available to them to draw the trees.[9] > > Left-right tree makes no sense. It doesn't distinguish the rbtree from its predecessor the avl tree. I don't think it's helpful to rename a standard piece of computing terminology unless it's actually hurting us to have it. Obviously if it were called a "master-slave" tree, I would be in favour of renaming it.
As I said "it means nothing if you've never interacted with gambling culture," red black in the context of the trees as zero meaning other than as a name to find it on the internet, Search for that name enough and you will undoubtedly be getting ads for online roulette sites within hours, if you have a problem gambling past, this might not be the desired effect you'd want.
The reasons something was named a particular thing can and will be different from what a societal context for them means now, and I believe it's more important to worry about current societal contexts than legacy historical namings. I'm not seriously suggesting we rename red-black trees, but if someone who had a problematic gambling background had issues with them I'd definitely be open for considering it.
Dave.
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