A short proposal for discussion: RS-232

Gary W. Swearingen garys at freebsd.org
Thu Sep 8 21:58:47 UTC 2005


The Handbook uses these terms (for the same purpose, AFAICT):

RS232, RS-232, RS232C, RS-232C, RS232D, EIATIA-232-E, and CCITT V.24


I propose that when editing doc and www files, we change these "232"
terms to simply "RS-232", with very few exceptions where a particular
version seems to be needed.

And I propose the removal of this glossary item:

   Recommended Standard 232C (RS232C)
           A standard for communications between serial devices.

which is rather odd and only used in the definition of RS232C.

I have a contributed patch in hand which starts implementing the
switch to hyphens in RS232 in the serialcomms chapter.  I intend to
remove the -C's and commit it in a few days (after mentor auth.)
unless something discourages me.

Reasoning:

The most recent related standard is called by it's developer
TIA-232-F, but since TIA is an association under the umbrella of the
EIA, it probably should be called "EIA/TIA-232-F" which is how this
helpful web page has the full form:
http://www.interfacebus.com/Design_Connector_RS232.html

I like the way that page has most references: EIA-232; it's sort of
a lowest-common-denominator when you don't need to be more specific.
But RS-232 will surely be more widely recognized for a long time.

BTW, I have a book with excerpts of official EIA RS-232-C documents
in which they used hyphens, as in RS-232-C and RS-422.  I've been
told that Google reports:

	RS232	3,950,000 results
	RS-232	7,240,000 results

Interested readers can easily-enough find info on the many related
(old, newer, newest, 25-pin, 9-pin, USA, ISO) standards outside
FreeBSD documents.



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