The
question of
The Origin of Dots (look for my new provocative work at a burnt-out
computer bookstore near you around
15 October 2015) is indeed a vexing one in
computer etymology.
It's reasonably obvious that the `.' came from the C / Pascal (and probably Algol, and all that lot) convention to access structure members. If I have
struct {
/* ... */
domain yahoo;
/* ... */
} com;
then I access
Yahoo! using the `.'
operator.
But then the correct form would have to be com.yahoo. Can this mean that JANET was right?!