Havelock and Xform

[jack]

Stupid questions, but where google and wikipedia fail me, my friends generally know.

1. "Xform" as an abbreviation of "transform". That's standard, isn't it? But where does that come from? I'm suddenly unsure. Is that just 'x' being 'an arbitrary operation'?

ETA: Thanks to three people who almost instantly pointed out that X works for 'trans', in the sense 'cross'.

2. "Havelock". I'm really only familiar with it as in "Vetinari", but I have the feeling it's a reference to something or other. There's a few other Havelocks on wikipedia, but nothing that made sense to me.

Comments

[filecoreinuse.livejournal.com]

The 'X' stands for 'trans'. As a prefix 'trans' means 'across', 'through', 'over', etc to the 'X' diagramatically shows two streams crossing. The '=' sign is sometimes (albeit far less often) used to denote 'cis' or similar prefixes.