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Subject:RE: Technical meaning for autonomous? From:LDurway -at- pav -dot- com To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Thu, 14 Nov 2002 15:39:15 -0600
> it is commonly used to describe netwoks. As in OSPF is a
> routing protocol
> used within autonomous systems, and BGP is a routing protocol
> used between
> autonomous systems (weak definition, but you get the idea).
Yes, I had forgotten about that one.
> | Can anyone give me a sentence where the word "automatic" is
> | necessary? Besids "automatic transmission," I mean.
>
> in C/C++ programming... automatic (local) variables.
> in the news... automatic weapon.
> windows 2000 help turned up an impressive number of topics
> that included
> automatic.
I meant to exclude common compound words like "automatic variable,"
"automatic weapon," and so on. I wasn't clear. Even so, the word
"automatic" in those contexts is meaningful only because we assume
that you know the history of variable allocation or of weapons.
"Automatic" in the context of "automatic weapons" suggests machine
guns, but in fact, an "automatic pistol" is a single-shot weapon,
deemed automatic for historical reasons that are no longer really
meaningful. Common usage has made "automatic" a meaningful word
in some cases, but if someone doesn't know the historical context,
it's useless.
> In the larger context of your question, I think the types of
> processes you
> are referring to are usually termed something like background
> processes,
> batch processes, or perhaps non-interactive processes. But I
> think I may be
> missing something.
As you can probably see by now, I was referring more to cases
where the writer chooses "automatic" to modify a word that already
has an appropriate meaning in context, not "automatic" where part
of an established compound word.
Lindsey
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