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Comment by weinzierl | Hacker News Reader

Many German publications of that time had the peculiarity of using German terms for everything and Siemens was most radical in it.

For example the stack was often referred to as "Kellerstapelspeicher"[1]. The stack pointer was "Kellerstapelspeicherzeiger".

The whole stack terminology revolved around the basement (Keller = cellar) metaphor. For example push was "einkellern" and pop "auskellern". I think this was influenced by Friedrich L. Bauer's work.

[1] The linked manual is quite lax and uses just "Stapelspeicher" and "Stapelzeiger". But at least it has "Stapelzeigeradresse" which is a nice and long compound.

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That's not a peculiarity. "Stack" is a metaphor just like "Keller" (cellar) is. And in fact "Keller" is the apparently older term, as it was already used in the original Samelson/Bauer patent. See Wikipedia:

> Klaus Samelson and Friedrich L. Bauer of Technical University Munich proposed the idea of a stack called Operationskeller ("operational cellar") in 1955[6][7] and filed a patent in 1957.[8][9][10][11] In March 1988, by which time Samelson was deceased, Bauer received the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award for the invention of the stack principle.[12][7]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_(abstract_data_type)#His...

German is the Java of human languages (at least when related to naming)

Relevant: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ADqLBc1vFwI

Objective-C....

"Arreglo" (fix, set) for "array" isn't any better in Spanish, sadly. We could just use "formación", or better, "serie" (as in series in English).

Ajuste looks better than "arreglo". It actually means set (the noun made from a verb, not a collection), so you are actually saying that some data belongs into sorted nxn dimensions, but it lacks the sorted meaning. You aren't fixing some broken data. And some 'arreglo' between people happens after previous troubles, so you are actually trying to set some fix.

"Serie" can mean both a sorted (ordinal) and unsorted set of elements.

I’ve only recently scratched the surface of CPU architecture/ hardware , and one of the challenges was picturing the register stack. For some reason, reimagining this as a single doorway keller (cellar) made the whole First-In Last-Out arrangement much easier to visualise! Strange how words can be transformative!

Can you back this up?

Because googling for "Kellerstapelspeicherzeiger" yields only a single result which purports the same legend on stackexchange without providing a source and has been downvoted to -3.

As a matter of fact the submission links the full manual and they also just use "Stapelspeicher" and not "Kellerstapelspeicher". And that manual is by Siemens and from the 80s.

"Stapelzeiger" and "Stapelspeicher" otoh yield many results.

Googling for "Kellerstapelspeicher" only yield results for "Keller, Stapelspeicher", indicating that those are not used in one words but are synonyms.

The German-language Wikipedia article on Stapelspeicher [1] points to a a patent registration [2].

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stapelspeicher [2] https://worldwide.espacenet.com/patent/search/family/0069672...

Which supports what I am saying.

It's unlikely to appear in Bauer's publications because he coined and used the Keller metaphor. It is much more likely to appear in later publications that tried to translate stack but at the same time wanted to pay tribute to Bauer, hence the usage of both Keller and Stapel.

You are right to be skeptical. Unfortunately I could not find the "Handbuch für Datenverarbeitung" mentioned in the Stack Exchange post. Amazon lists it with ISBN 3927892009 but it is not available unsurprisingly. Neither libgen nor archive.org seem to have it either.

Apart from several humorous mentions over the decades I found one serious reference in an exam text from 1997 [1].

[1] https://www.telle-online.de/fernuni/ruf/klausur/1704-97.html...

My first impression was that this is another sarcastic variation of the German tapeworm theme.

You've made me curious about the tapeworm theme!

I remember one of my CS professors talking about "Kellerspeicher" when teaching stacks in algorithms class. He was quite oldschool, so I wasn't surprised that he would use German words, but using a cellar as a metaphor for a stack seemed like a confusing choice.

And Siemens does it still, even though they translate words to English. Using Tia Portal, one "downloads" a program from the host to the PLC.

That's pretty common terminology in PLC's though. You also download to Koyo PLC's from Automation Direct.

Same with Rockwell (Allen-Bradley) PLCs. You download a program to the PLC, and upload a program from a PLC.

I always assumed the naming confusion for those was just a matter of perspective; if you are thinking about a "download" from the perspective of the PLC receiving the file or the user sending the file.

Also in embedded systems development, one downloads the application to the target device.

I more commonly see that called “upload” (Arduino, platform.io, avrdude, esptool) rather than “download”.

That is likely, for lack of a better word, an Arduino-ism. Compare a search for "ISP downloader" vs "ISP uploader"; the latter yields exclusively Arduino results, while the former has results for not only Arduino but other MCUs and even FPGAs and CPLDs' programming devices as well as JTAG.

Well, at least, they don't "play them in" :)

In this thread: Americans bewildered that someone might prefer to speak their native language instead of English.

I'm not a native English speaker and I'm bewildered that people care whether technical vocabulary is native or loaned.

I understand political arguments (cultural cohesion, antiglobalism, diversity, etc), but, damn, it's technical, not some culturally foundational stuff.

Spaniard here: localized terms from English are kinda vanilla in Spanish:

stack -> pila

push -> lit. empujar; or meter (put sth in)

pull -> sacar (get sth out) . Pull it's literally 'tirar de', but that means 'pull from', that's it, semantically you don't get the item. Thus, 'sacar' it's perfect for this.

Altough I don't like what Latinoamericans did to 'array', which is 'arreglo' (repair, fix, setting). "Formación" (already used in military as a sorted array of soldiers, in English too) would be far better.

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