"Rob Stewart" <stewart@sig.com> wrote in message news:200409040430.i844U9410532@lawrencewelk.systems.susq.com...
From: "Jonathan Turkanis" <technews@kangaroologic.com>
Sentence: "Sources, Sinks and their refinements are called resources."
The term is overused in programming. Maybe "data resources" or "data-module" or so would be better.
I know that 'resource' is a loaded term ;-) but I couldn't think of anything better. 'Data-module' doesn't seem very descriptive. Unfortunately, the
standard
term seems to be "Source/Sink" -- which I find ugly.
FWIW, I don't think "resource" captures the idea very well and I do agree that "source" and "sink" are rather technical, so they aren't so good, general purpose words. A term used for physical sources and sinks and, colloquially, for their drivers, is "device." Other choices: gadget, terminus, endpoint. Among these, I like "endpoint" best. It even captures the notion that they must be at one end or the other of a chain.
It seems there's not much support for the term 'resource', although it's come to sound quite natural to me. Of the various possibilities you mention, I think I like 'device' best. I'd still want to keep source and sink for as names for input and output devices, though, since they're the standard terms used by filtering libraries. Jonathan