I - O

                                                 I

                                               IDL
IDL = Interactive Data Language

                                              Icon
"The name Icon (which is not spelled ICON) is not an acronym nor does it stand for anything in particular, although the word iconoclastic was mentioned at the time the name was chosen.  The name predates the now common use of "icon" to refer to small images used in graphical user interfaces.  This latter usage sometimes causes persons to think mistakenly that Icon is designed to create or manipulate icons.  There's not much that can be done about this." (icon-faq)

                                        Icont, Iconx
"The translator (Icont) and interpreter (Iconx) ...."  (Lang. doc.)

                                          IntelliBots
IntelliBots = Intelligent Robots

                                              ISETL
ISETL = Interactive SETL 

                                                 J

                                                 J
From: Emmett McLean <emclean@sfsuvax1.sfsu.edu>

Roger Hui in his book "An Implementation of J" says that he selected it because it is easy to type.

                                             JB-PROLOG
JB-PROLOG = Jan Burse's PROLOG

                                             jgawk
jgawk = japanized gawk

                                              JOVE
JOVE = Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs

                                                 K

                                              Kevo
From: jta@mofile.fi (mofile)

Kevo is a placename in Northern Finland. As far as I know the word has no meaning in modern Finnish. I suspect that it is a word of the Sami language (the language of indigeneous Lapps)  which is related to the Finnish but distantly. You might get more information from the University of Helsinki at http://www.helsinki.fi/

Cheers,

Jarno Tarkoma
jta@mofile.fi

                                                Kvik
                                              ******* 
From: Per.Mildner@CSD.UU.SE (Per Mildner)

I do not know, but kvik sounds like kvick which means fast/speedy and of course kalkul sound like kalkyl which is the same as calculus.

Per Mildner                      Per.Mildner@CSD.UU.SE
http://www.csd.uu.se/~perm/

                                              ******* 
From: Asher Hoskins <asher@prl.philips.co.uk>

(...)

This is what one of the original news postings about Kvikkalkul says about the name:

From: an31517@anon.penet.fi
>First there were questions about the name of the language. It's indeed not Swedish but rather Norwegian. Well, there were some Norwegians in the team that developed the language. The name kvikkalkul was believed to be a pun on Plankalkuel, the first high level language that was developed by Konrad Zuse. Kvikkalkul has hardly anything in common with Plankalkuel, but both were high-level languages and the only high-level languages in the world at that time.

I assume the name is a pun along the lines of "kvikkalkul" == "quick
calculate".

Hope this helps.

Asher.

                                                 L

                                               lcc
lcc = local ANSI C compiler

                                               Lex
LEX = LEXical analyzer generator
Paper:
M. E. Lesk, A Lexical Analyzer Generator, CS TR 39, Bell Labs (Oct. 1975)

                                               LISP
LISP =  LISt Processing 

                                               Logo
                                            ****** 
From: wally feurzeig <feurzeig@labs-n.bbn.com>

>(From the greek LOGOS?)

Yes, Logo is derived from the Greek Logos.

Wally Feurzeig
feurzeig@bbn.com 

                                            ****** 

From: "Paul M. Wexelblat" <wex@cs.uml.edu>

> (From the greek LOGOS?)

Yes, Wally Feurzeig named Logo (He's still at bbn.org) with that connection in mind.
(The original LISP version was named "ghost" for no clear reason, BTW)
Wally wrote an article about the origins of logo, it was published many years ago in a book called "digital Deli" -- I'm sure it is well out of print, but if you need more, maybe you can find it (or email wally)

Cheers,

        ...Wex

                                         LogoMation
From: shavit@viewlogic.com (Chuck Shavit)

It has some of the features of LOGO (turtle geometry, its appeal to novice programmers), and it supports aniMATION...

Chuck Shavit

                                          LS FORTRAN
LS FORTRAN = Language Systems FORTRAN

                                                 M

Don't enter three M's in your house: 
Michel (= Frenchman),
Moses (= Hebrew), and
Mustafa (= Turk)
--> Greek proverb

                                            Marlais
                                           ***1***
From: "Patrick C. Beard" <beard@cs.ucdavis.edu>

I don't rightly know.

Brent?

- Patrick

                                           ***2***

From: "Joseph N. Wilson" <jnw@cis.ufl.edu>

Patrick, Brent, and Everyone:

Brent has told me that Marlais is Dylan M. Thomas' middle name, which I believe, however, this appears to be a little-known fact.  Where did you discover this Brent?  Marlais is also the name of a small village in France.  I wonder if there is a connection.

Joe

                                           ***3***

From: Brent Benson <bwb@concentra.com>

I obtained this information from the small, paperback copy of the
American Heritage Dictionary that I keep on my shelf at work.  I'm not sure how Dylan Thomas came to have "Marlais" as his middle name.
In any case, it seemed a suitably obtuse name for a Dylan
implementation :-).

Brent

                                               MAS
MAS = Macintosh Assembly System

                                             MATLAB
MATLAB = MATrix LABoratory

                                             MDP-80
"MDP stands for Maria, David, and Peter, my wife and two sons.  Since I started this Paul has come along but MDPP seemed rather silly.  The 8008 is an obvious copy from Intel, and if the machine code and microprocessor architecture seems familiar you must have used the Motorola 6502 sometime in the past! "
(Lang.  doc.)

                                             METH
METH =  Modula ETH (= Eidgenoessische Technische Hochschule)

                                                MI
MI = Maschine fuer die Informatikausbildung

                                              MIDI
MIDI = Musical Instrument Digital Interface

                                              MINDY
MINDY = Mindy Is Not Dylan Yet

Note - Ed.:
Similar etymologies:
GNU = GNU's Not Unix
MINT = MINT Is Not TRAC (= Text Reckoning And Compiling)
MiNT = MINT is Not TOS  
MINCE = MINCE Is Not Complete Emacs

                                              MiNT
MiNT = MINT is Not TOS 

                                                ML
ML = Machine Language (:The Language List)       *or*
ML = Meta-Language (:meta-lang-faq)

                                               MLP
MLP = MacLogimo Plus

                                            MODULA
MODULA = MODUlar LAnguage.

                                              Mops
"The name Mops could well be an acronym for "Mike's Object-oriented Programming System" but since I feel the computing world has enough acronyms already, I wouldn't want to be too dogmatic about this.  Hence we spell Mops as Mops, not MOPS."
(Lang. doc.)

                                            Mosml
Mosml = Moscow ML

Note (about the cow icon):
"(..) I chose a cow for the icon for three reasons:
1) "cow" are the letters missing from mosml. 
2) Caml Light uses a camel, so I though an animal face would be appropriate.
3) I think cows are nice."
(Lang. doc.)

                                            MuPAD
MuPAD = Multi Processing Algebra Data Tool

                                                 N

                                             NJSML      
NJSML= New Jersey SML
                                                              
                                                 O

                                            Oberon
From: mikeg@psg.com (Mike Gallo)

 >(OBERON = OBjEct oRiented prOgramming  laNguage? )
 
At about the time that Wirth and Gutknecht began their project, the Voyager space probe transmitted pictures to Earth of the planet Uranus and one of its moons, Oberon.  Voyager was never expected to last that long.  
As a small tribute to such a successful feat of engineering, and as an inspiration to himself, Wirth named his own project after the Voyager's (then) latest object of invetigation.
You can find this story in the introductions to _The  Oberon System_ and _Project Oberon_.

Notes - Ed.:
"Oberon is the outermost of Uranus's known satellites and second largest (...). Oberon is the King of the Fairies and husband of Titania in Shakespeare's Midsummer-Night's Dream."
http://chandra.astro.indiana.edu/astronomy/nineplanets/oberon.html

"Unlike the other bodies in the solar system which have names from classical mythology, Uranus's moons take their names from the writings of Shakespeare and Pope."
http://chandra.astro.indiana.edu/astronomy/nineplanets/uranus.html

                                         Oberon/F
"The 'F' in Oberon/F comes from 'framework'. Oberon/F is an object-oriented framework" (Lang. doc)

                                         Open PROLOG
"Open Prolog is called 'Open' because 'external' predicates can be dropped into it via a Hypercard-like External Predicate Interface." 
(Lang. doc.)

Date: Wed, Dec 20, 1995 9:40 am
From: Michael Brady <Michael.Brady@relay.cs.tcd.ie> 
To: xpolakis@hol.gr

Antreas, I was gawking ( = looking mindlessly) through your ETYMOLOGICAL LEXICON, and I was looking at the entry for Open Prolog. 
Indeed it reports faithfully what is given in the documentation, but that's a fake. I thought you might be interested in the truth: 
The word Macintosh is from the Gaelic, probably Scottish Gaelic, which is similar enough to Irish Gaelic.
It is from 'Mac an Taoisigh', which means 'Son of the Leader': Mac = Son (or sometimes just 'decendant') an = the
Taoisigh = possessive (?) case of Taoiseach = Leader (The 'Prime Minister' of Ireland is called The Taoiseach).
Anyway, of course I wanted to call Open Prolog 'Mac Prolog', but understood Apple were not keen on products called MacThis and MacThat. In Irish, however, the prefix O' means 'of the tribe', which is close enough to the 'descendant' meaning of Mac, so I thought, why not call it O'Prolog. This did not find favour with my friends - too much of the 'Irish Blarney' about it - so I thought about 'Oh! Prolog', really out of frustration. Unfortunately, there's a great book called 'Oh! Pascal' (by Doug Cooper), so the names were just too close. So Open Prolog [supported by the excuses given in the documentation] came from Oh! Prolog which came from O'Prolog which comes from O' which has a similar meaning to the Irish word Mac, which brings us back to the start. 

Best regards
Mike

-----
Mike Brady
Department of Computer Science
University of Dublin, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland

Note-Ed: Why Mac named Mac?
"Back in the days prior to the Mac's introduction, there were several projects under development of Apple Computer. All were named after types of apples. There was a Pippin project, a Golden Delicious Project, and the Macintosh project.
The Macintosh name was choosen by Jef Raskin, an Apple engineer who helped develop the first Mac.
Unfortunately, decent spelling checkers were still a few years off. It's Raskin who first misspelled Macintosh. Of course, he meant McIntosh ,the actual name of the popular red eating apples."
David Pogue - Joseph Schorr : Macworld Macintosh Secrets. IDG Books, USA, [1993], p. 290