And that, kids, is why we call it a “Patch”

But here's the story: In 2003, jzwinck and I were desk neighbors at a company everyone here has heard of whose original technology was written in the 1980s on computers made by Perkin-Elmer, a big government contractor most famous for screwing up the Hubble telescope's mirror.

Instead of pids, processes had names. You could send a command to them like this: "SEND MYPROG EXIT" and then, if you wrote your program to accept an EXIT command, it would run your subroutine. This was also used for interprocess communication.

Then PE stopped making computers, and the company switched to Unix, but didn't want to rewrite all its IPC code. So it wrote a Fortran function called PEKLUDGE that took a string parameter representing the program name and stored it somewhere so that it could be used to receive IPCs later. The first thing every program did from that point on was call this function with the first arg from the command line, which was supposed to be the program name plus maybe a number if the machine needed to have multiple copies running.

Then they switched from Fortran to C for all new programs, and the way to call old Fortran functions in C was to lowercase the name and add an underscore.

And that's the story of why every program at this company starts with a call to pekludge_(argv[1])