On Wed, 12 Mar 2014, Brian Wall wrote:
> Just point out how much more you can get done in that extra 25% of
> your day you got back because your command is three letters rather
> than four.
Actually it's three letters rather than 11 ('cat' vs 'concatenate'). His
real problem was that the English word "Cat" is not really intuitive for
"display contents of file on screen", whereas "type", nominally, is. When
I mentioned 'cat' is short for 'concatenate', well, nobody knows what the
hell concatenate means, anyway, especially since this was not taking place
in an English-speaking country, as I'm sure you can tell from my accent.
You weren't just saving time, though. You can take 'ls' rather than 'list'
as an example. First, you just saved two bytes. That's two bytes for 'ls',
one (by your reckoning) for 'cat', etc. It adds up, especially when your
system would be lucky to count it's memory and storage space in kilobytes.
Also, think about working on remote terminals back in the 1960s, back when
300 bauds would be blazing fast. Hell, I worked on remote terminals in the
'80s and remember typing out commands and then waiting for them to
actually be displayed on the other end... that one extra character could
LITERALLY mean 5 minutes. So, yes... you saved a lot of your day.
Remember that the first message sent over ARPANET was "lo". It was
supposed to be "login" but then the system crashed...