Re: [doc] User Manual Suggestion

[Michael Witten <mfwitten@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 17:18, Michael Witten <mfwitten@gmail.com> wrote:
> In fact, I think masking this kind of thing with a catch-all word
> 'reference' is a bad idea. Rather than being hidden, it should be
> exposed: I think it would be beneficial to use the word 'address'
> rather than 'reference' when talking about the SHA-1 names. Then HEAD
> could be called a pointer variable, etc.
>
> So, a pointer variable's value is an object address that is the
> location of an object in git 'memory'. I think using this approach
> would make things significantly more transparent.

In fact, it's not particularly important that SHA-1 is used to compute
the address into git memory. The only thing that's important is that
the address is determined by content alone (I'm not even sure that
specifying that the address is a cryptographically sound hash of the
content is important; shouldn't that follow from the declaration that
it must be uniquely based on content alone?); the fact that's a SHA-1
is purely an implementation detail, and so it shouldn't appear
prominently in the documentation.

So, what do you say?

Let's start a reformation of the git terminology to use analogies that
have been around since the dawn of computing: 'memory', 'address', and
'pointer'.