Pageable vs. Pagable

By Alexander Schmidt

One week before Christmas I had the chance to talk to Dave Probert. We met in Redmond and talked about new features for future releases of the Windows Research Kernel. Unfortunately, I cannot tell you all the details here, but there will be a next version of the WRK. If you have any suggestions for features, feel free to comment.

However, Dave told me an interesting story he experienced while he proofread the comments of the kernel: The word pageable is actually no English word with respect to Merriam Webster. This fact, as I am no native English speaker, was completely new to me. I use pageable quite often, as the term is commonly used in computer science for memory pages that can be written to a file in order to get some free space in the main memory.

When the first programmers used the word in their comments, they were not sure how to spell it. Thus, as a consequence, you can find both versions pageable and pagable in the code. Also, there are some typedefs defining functions with both types of spelling. So watch out 🙂

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