Why 'Unknwn.h' instead of 'Unknown.h'? Is it misprint? [closed]

Question

Why is Microsoft's COM header file named as Unknwn.h, instead of Unknown.h? Is it misprint, or are there objective reasons for such naming?

Unoccupied

@PaulManta According to the tags, I would say COM. – Smithy

Some employers ban the use of the letter o. In some cases it's to avoid confusion with the Arabic numeral for "five", and in others it may be for ethical or religious reasons. – Newsworthy

@KerrekSB: surely you must be joking. – Greatnephew

@nightcracker If anything to avoid confusion between o and 0. But this question is ridiculous. – Cutthroat

was it originally written to be compatible with some odd/old filesystem? – Zhang

I think it's an interesting question, and I would like to know why. I voted to reopen. – Smithy

@EtiennedeMartel i'm also curious. people who have been programming decades longer than i remember such historical facts. (so did i) – Zhang

@Etienne de Martel Is the answer for this question is interesting to nobody? :) – Unoccupied

@Bush: The question is interesting. Unfortunately, it was a bad question because it's poorly worded and impossible to answer. – Drandell

@Florin Stingaciu It is unconvincing. Then why the other header has a name 'iostream' instead of 'istream'? – Unoccupied

@Bush There are two headers: istream and iostream. – Smithy

Hey guys, this not just some unknow header, this is the unknown interface, so it needs to have some kind of individidual name, so why not remove the o, removing the u whould have been worth. – Varicella

Wording can be fixed, @Mooing, as you demonstrated. What makes you think it's impossible to answer? Why did you vote to close the question after you voted to re-open it? – Transit

@alk: probably I would have chosen "IUnknown.h". Unambiguous, has the same name of the interface and also complies to 8.3 restrictions. – Chlorophyll

@RobKennedy: I voted to open because I saw it was closed as not constructive, and thought "it is constructive". Then after it was open, I eventually realized this is "too localized", and voted to close again. :( – Drandell

Author implies that we know the answer - U n k n w n --> U know Why... ns are padding the brotherhood uses to convey cryptic message like this. There's also a movie coming up - U know why...Britney did it again? nuff said about the legacy of this header – Agglutinin

Probably like that to avoid conflict with an existing Unknown.h header (a big file at Microsoft :) – Inertia

@GrahamPerks: Do you work for Microsoft? Or do you have a citation for that? – Audie

Six letter filenames go back a long, long way: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Radix-50 – Coricoriaceous

I'm just guessing on a conflict with an existing unknown.h header. Sorry I wasn't clear on that. – Inertia

Short of someone from the language team coming and answering this question, I don't see how it could ever be answered definitively. And let's say they did, Does it matter why? Is this a specific programming problem you face? It would seem to be a trivia-esque question, and those aren't a good fit for Stack Overflow. Perhaps you'd be better off Emailing Raymond Chen? – Bashibazouk

Meta discussion about this question. Please do not delete this question while it is being discussed on meta! – Butcher