Dave Gomboc wrote:
Besides which, "fs" is difficult for an English-as-a-second-language speaker to look up in the dictionary. I have the impression that some simply don't care about that because English is _their_ first language -- an unfortunate attitude.
Well. It's actually the opposite. Because English is (presumably) your first language, you prefer the non-abbreviated "filesystem" over "fs". From the perspective of someone who doesn't "think in English", the two have pretty much the same inherent value, i.e. they are arbitrary identifiers. A mental mapping translates these identifiers into the entities they represent. Since the extra letters in the longer identifier do not add any semantic value to non-English speakers, they are merely clutter and do not contribute to readability. Your observation that "stdio" is a _word_ in non-English programmer cultures, and not an abbreviation of "standard input/output", is very much in line with the above.