Talk:PIC (markup language)

Untitled

DISCUSSION problem faced during programming — Preceding unsigned comment added by 61.95.192.45 (talk) 09:42, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

figr

Does anyone know what happened to figr? It's a shell site now... --202.213.201.225 (talk) 01:33, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

cip?

When I worked at Bell Labs "back in the day" we used to run a program cip ("pic" spelled backwards) on the Blit (computer terminal) that would let us graphically draw the diagrams and would then emit the pic code to embed in our troff's. Can anyone dig up a reference so that we might add a line about that here? --Eliyahu S ^Talk 12:13, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

Assorted changes and cleanups

Plenty more needed, but anyway:

• Title is PIC in all-capitals not Pic or pic: The authoritative source is the (public) abstract in original 1982 article (paywall) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/spe.4380120102 . In the 1991 update (no paywall) https://pikchr.org/home/uv/pic.pdf the original author (Brian Kernighan) seemed less fussy or perhaps just didn't have a professional editor checking for consistency.
• Classification is "markup language" as far as I can see, although it really should probably be "vector markup language" but markup languages are still quite messy on wikipedia. It doesn't fit into "programming languages" anyway (which is where I briefly moved it, oops). I think this is the best we can do.
• Added Wikibooks template, but possibly not in the canonical manner — Preceding unsigned comment added by DanShearer (talk • contribs) 19:51, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

There is absolutely no reason to spell it in all caps. The source you linked yourself consistently spells it lowercase except at the start of the sentences and in the title. The odd spelling in the title is probably reminiscent of the convention seen in manual pages where the name in page header is spelled in all caps and followed by the section number. Whatever the reason, we shouldn't follow the least common incidental usage. It should be cased the same way eqn, tbl, troff, or any other lowercase UNIX command is. And no, there is no difference between the name of a language and the name of a command in this case. Please give it a bit more consideration before moving the page around.

By my reading of WP:QUALIFIER, adding parenthetic disambiguation wasn't needed either, because, pic being a common abbreviation for picture, it's already commonly referred to as the pic language. Just like the article was titled before. And the difference between a domain-specific programming language generating graphics as output and a procedural markup language isn't that obvious, if any at all, cf. PostScript. –MwGamera (talk) 23:53, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

Agree. The article should be titled all lowercase, as per other UNIX commands. In this case the name is not an acronym like grep, so not even that can be offered as an excuse for all caps. (And note that even acronyms like grep and sed are all lowercase in the UNIX convention.) --Eliyahu S ^Talk 10:34, 15 July 2021 (UTC)