rhowch
When scooby burns his tail
this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2026
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Shaggy, his arms open wide
It's sad when you realize that Welsh is actually a more niche language than the C standard library
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(17 replies)
Long ago in the Windows 9x era there was also "Is this a Windows DLL file, or a transcript of a digestion noise" and the stuff was like "MSGRBL32.DLL"
https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/mbsrtowcs.3.html
https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/strxfrm.3.html
https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/wcstold.3p.html
https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/wcscoll.3p.html
wcsoll in the picture is an error, unless it's Welsh.
according to Google translate:
rhowch: give
cwtch: hug
mwyn: ore
wmffre: Humphrey
The trick is that 'w' represents an actual double-U vowel sound in Welsh. Not remotely surprised that's what was picked up
Cwtch is one of my favourite words. Pronounced like "clutch" without the L. It means hug.
"Give us a cwtch ye daft old sod" ❤️
Sounds like the origin of “clutch of eggs.”
oh wow that's nice. i'll see if i can remember it.
Wild assumption for me to make, but is it perhaps a potential origin for "coochie coo"?
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I'm just scrolling by and saw the Welsh. I know none of the others, so by a process of elimination, I know them all.
Assuming the question implies an inclusive OR, I know all the answers too : True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True.
Ah yes. A language forced onto unwilling participants by people who still think it should relevant in the modern age. And the other one is a Celtic language.
C will be relevant till the heat death of the universe. if humanity ever dooms itself back to the stone age, all it would require is some bloke to invent a rudimentary binary computer and some nerd to write a basic C compiler for it, humanity will doom itself again in less than 50 years.
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I'm pretty sure that is neither and was a text I sent last week when drunk...
Its cool that alcohol brings out your superpower of on-the-fly encryption
Cool... Crippling addiction... You say tomato I say... cries self to sleep
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I guess strxfrm and the like date back to a period in the 80s when symbol names had to be kept short for the compiler/interpreter's sake. Like while BASIC back in those days technically allowed > 8 chr names, the interpreter only stored the first 8. In other words, the first 8 needed to be unique. As such, people tended to stick with <= 8 chr symbols to avoid interpreter issues. I think C allowed up to 31? But the culture of <= 8 prevailed nevertheless.
Then in the 90s, such restrictions were largely dropped in most languages, and symbol names ballooned in size to take advantage of this new freedom. In C++, you even had reserved words growing to the likes of reinterpret_cast around that time, but APIs just got ridiculous along the lines lengthy_class_name_followed_by_fully_spelled_out_method.
Today, people seem to have come to their senses and settled on more reasonable lengths, though not to 80s extremes. Like going back to C++, we have new reserved words like decltype and constexpr. In the 90s, these would likely have been spelled out in full like constant_expression?
i still have a vague mistrust of file extensions longer than three characters.
like a glass walkway, i know .jpeg is just as safe as .jpg, but there's a hint of uneasiness.
I also have a vague mistrust of non-alphanumerics in file extensions. Like while .c++ is fine, .cpp feels…safer?
Well, yeah. Why would you tempt the shell to get garbled?
.cc and .hh feels the most serious.
Then in the 90s, such restrictions were largely dropped in most languages, and symbol names ballooned in size to take advantage of this new freedom.
But with great freedom comes great responsibility. I think Microsoft went from digestion noices to indirectly advertising their stake in arthritis medicine. I mean my fingers ache just looking at C# or PowerShell.
What was so wrong about puts or cout? I know it's not the most intricate functions, but going from a 4chr function to "Console.WriteLine()" is a symptom.
And as long as I'm already a riled up old fart, let me tell you about autocompletion. Why does MS have to autocomplete entire commands from ambiguous strings?
And the kids don't get it. They don't even write the code anymore, let alone understand it... I want coffee flavoured coffee, heavy metal and for dark mode to fucking die!
That felt better, I'm sorry for anybody making it this long.
Dude what's with ur crusade against dark mode lol. It's not like dark mode replaced light mode.
In some cases it did. I often come across dark theme only websites.
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When the grass gets long at my welsh cottage I’m mwyn that wmffre
Dydw i ddim yn deall...
My partner has been learning a tiny bit of Welsh on Duolingo so this got a giggle out of her 🙂
Are there any C libraries other than the standard library that use this kind of naming style?
Besides ncurses
ncursed
A few from llvm (maybe?)
- llyfr
- llanc
- llif
Was that supposed to be wcscoll, not wcsoll?
...they're the same picture
fixed, lol
Mwyn is a Super Furry Animals album, and I believe the biggest selling Welsh album of all time. Y Teimlad is a real tear jerker. Cwytch is a cuddle. Heard Nigel Owens say it to two misbehaving players during a rugby match once.
The rest I dunno…
Yes.
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